Photobucket, and the Loss of Knowledge
 

This isn't a critique of 67-72ChevyTrucks.com (this was written elsewhere), but this is a thought I've been having on the larger situation with automotive forums, especially after Photobucket pulled the plug on remote hosting with no warning, extorting users to regain hosting privileges.

Forums have provided me with a wealth of information that I could've never found on the street, but it's time to take a step back and look at the state of things and see what needs to be done to preserve the decades of knowledge we've built across this world wide web. Build threads, tech info, and more have been destroyed recently, and I see this as a problem for the greater automotive community as the vendors and sites we use age on.

:waah:

What's the post-forum-era solution? We're on the verge of losing a mass of 20+ years of knowledge, and it's a info grab we need to focus on.

Photobucket has done everything they can in their failure to support their business in a user-friendly way (ultimately blaming ad blockers) to burn their entire userbase, paid and free, and tell everyone to F-off, and this can be expected by the other small hosts. There's likely only a short amount of time to save even PB's hostage content (there's some short-term work-arounds to download the hidden image), and the main issue is that many people are not around any longer to back-up their photos, someone's gotta do it in their absence.

Facebook is too vapid, they've already begun date-limiting searches and masking old content with in groups. It's still on record on some server, sure, but they're not there for you to archive information.

BB forums are falling out of favor for discussion and many are shooting themselves in the foot in politics, with both sponsor-supported and private forums driving off users for a myriad of reasons while forgetting how to cull the herd of bad content. Even with a good photo host, it's a time consuming process to build even simple posts with BB code and forum software has often been left forgotten and out of date, meaning user-friendliness is still stuck in the 56K WARNING!!! dial-up days.

Everyone splitting back into their corners of personal blogs and whatnot will never work as forums were also well-sorted by Google and people do not have time today to seek a bunch of individual destination sites.

With that nail in the coffin, it's not going to be too long until the larger forums struggle, and we've watched small-to-medium forums suffer heavy user losses (and it's not uncommon to hear about the closing of one, these days). Photobucket killing one of the reasons people use forums will accelerate that decline as reference material loses its value without photos.

Recently, Wiki-how pages have begun to host valuable content, taking the SloppyMechancs as a role model of modern community knowledge gathering. A Facebook group is where daily discussion happens, but important information is archived in a Wiki, separating the fluff from the stuff people actually need to know. Some forums have distilled community info into archives, while leaving the greater discussion on the boards.

Should users and forum owners begin campaigning to collect stickies and important tech info and find ways to archive it now? Where should it be hosted? Do we need 'another' message board, or is there a better platform to archive this info on?

:smoke:

Re: Photobucket, and the Loss of Knowledge
 

Got this spammer diana reported...^^^

Re: Photobucket, and the Loss of Knowledge
 

And yet, two days later, it's still here.

Maybe I was right about forums... :(

Re: Photobucket, and the Loss of Knowledge
 

I got a good idea, why don't you become a moderator and help police them...:)... They are hard to keep up with.

LockDoc

Re: Photobucket, and the Loss of Knowledge
 

You're saying you reported it two days ago?

Post forum era? :lol: You're way off

Re: Photobucket, and the Loss of Knowledge
 

heck, photobucket IS the reason i actually went looking for adblocker. it got so bad you had to sit there for 2 minutes while all the pop ups lagged and loaded.

Re: Photobucket, and the Loss of Knowledge
 

Mongocanfly took care of that, where were y'all? ;)

And the decline of member count, posting activity, and the death of several niche forums over the years is counter to what you're saying special-K, and with Photobucket killing a wealth of content on here, it's something that's worth talking about.

Re: Photobucket, and the Loss of Knowledge
 

I Am not being political, and I don't want to get in the middle of something, but texanidiot25 is right. A wealth of information has been lost. I click on a build thread, and all is see is the Photobucket message saying basically "screw you". People worked hard to document and share their trails and tribulations during their build process and Photobucket took it all away in one fell swoop.

My only question is " what do we do next?" How do we document and record our experiences for future builders? Is there a good Photobucket alternative?
Thanks.

Re: Photobucket, and the Loss of Knowledge
 

Hoping they reverse it because I agree, it's a real bummer looking at old threads seeing that message. Just another way for them to make money.

Re: Photobucket, and the Loss of Knowledge
 

There is one simple answer that has been enabled on most forums; Message attachments. I've always used it when it is there. Just click the 'Manage Attachments' and there ya go, your pictures with your messages.

Re: Photobucket, and the Loss of Knowledge
 

Its not a simple answer - TI brings up a good point which nobody seems to want to talk about here on this site. Sure I agree using the site attachment management function is the right way to do it, but it needs updating. More than 5 photos at a time and more size. Im no computer programmer but it has to be possible.

PB has seriously destroyed the content on this forum; plain and simple.... are forums going to make deals with PB to get the content back up? Is the content even going to be available if the 'legal stuff' gets over turned? Is it going to be as simple as PB flipping a switch and everyones pictures on every web forum are just going to go back to normal? or is it gone now forever?

The 'loss of knowledge' is really a serious issue that has been crafted from all the "forum-content-builders" - which is all of us.... not the forum directors, programmers, mods, 'police', that just make the site available. Although we trust them to never just pull the plug one day and delete all the content in its entirety, archiving these forum posts has to be something we look for into the future. Not necessarily the jam recipes and the EPA gas can conversations that ya'll want to labor over, but the real good truck CONTENT! - :lol:

Re: Photobucket, and the Loss of Knowledge
 

I gave up on P-Bucket!! Thanks to Leon's advise, I started putting my pics in the gallery.

Re: Photobucket, and the Loss of Knowledge
 

The brass tacks is that attachments cost this forum money, and they are too cheap to provide decent quality attachment capability because of the increase in storage costs. Who do you think they are, photobucket? :/

Re: Photobucket, and the Loss of Knowledge
 

Yes, PB has made archived forum content much harder to comprehend with the lack of photos. However, it is a falacy to think that PB was there to make long-term forum, or 3rd party anything a long term solution. While they endorsed 3rd party linking in the past, they have ALWAYS had in their TOS that photos could be wiped out with no recourse. (ie: server dies, backups corrupt, no backups, tough beans, its the users responsibility to maintain their own backups. And for that very same reason, "cloud" storage is another one of those items that will be biting many people in the future.

Alex.

Re: Photobucket, and the Loss of Knowledge
 

Thank you again for your input. I will let Josh explain it to you.

Re: Photobucket, and the Loss of Knowledge
 

Saw these addons for chrome and mozilla posted over on the hamb. I tried the mozilla one and it seems to work great! So far at least....

Re: Photobucket, and the Loss of Knowledge
 

We all have to adapt.

Re: Photobucket, and the Loss of Knowledge
 

that chrome add on does work

Re: Photobucket, and the Loss of Knowledge
 

Exactly. Every picture I have posted in the past 10 years on this message board is still here.

Re: Photobucket, and the Loss of Knowledge
 

What's your problem with attachments here? I have had no issue what so ever. More than 5 photos in a post takes you too far from the text if you need to refer back to it. 5 photos are plenty to absorb at one time. I find myself glancing across a long line of photos in a single post. Aren't you the computer expert? Well, I have no such claim to make. In fact, I am computer ignorant. I know just enough to be doing what I'm doing now and have no idea how any of this works. I guess ignorance is bliss. If you need help with using this simple, effective, and efficient method I'd be glad to spread my ignorance.

Re: Photobucket, and the Loss of Knowledge
 

The above Firefox add-on works great for me as well.

But I'm still going to try and edit/upload directly my photos, as I'd bet Photobucket will try and jack up the add-on.

Re: Photobucket, and the Loss of Knowledge
 

I know I'm quoting old BS, but I was away from the computer back then and never saw it. Texas Idiot, I knew Mongo took care of it. Why do you think I didn't know that? I was referring to you. You come here to gripe about the spammer being here for two days and I wondered about YOU reporting it. People can gripe about things here rather than do something to help. Is that you? That's what I was getting at. What do you contribute to make it better here?

Do you have some knowledge of member and post decline the rest of us don't? Things evolve. The site management tweaks the forum menu as needed. It is always evolving. Where you here "before" this place had so many forums and sub-forums? The administrators have responded to demand, per requests from members. Some turn out to be too slow and that's not the website's fault, it's the knuckleheads who are fixed on one forum and insist on posing content that belongs in another forums because the have blinders on. I've been here since '04 and people have always been coming and going. Being a permanent fixture on a site is not for everyone. In fact, it seems to be a minority. There are new members joining all the time as well... still. And, Photobucket isn't just killing content here, it's killing it all over the internet. We are talking about it and not just in this thread. BTW, this thread is about Photobucket, not this site. Have you been to "Site Feedback" lately or at all? No knowledge has been lost, just the pictures for reference. This place is still the most knowledgeable site for these trucks with none lost, just some pictures due to the irresponsibility of another website. I think anyone would agree, they could have gone about their decision to go out of business in a less impactful way to those who used it... for free. Someone called the administrators here cheap, yet the site with all it's vast resources is still free. But you already knew that

Re: Photobucket, and the Loss of Knowledge
 

Let's be real Liz, Josh isn't going to explain anything to me because why should/would he? I'm not asking for an explanation, I'm telling it how it is.

Well that's pretty BS because a picture speaks a thousand words and I think most would agree that many posts are pretty worthless now without the pics to go with them. Not everyone can or wants to read a wall of text to understand something.

Have you seen the ads here? Just because you don't pay money doesn't mean it's free.

I agree that this site does contain a lot of good knowledge, but facebook groups are doing to forums what forums did to libraries.

Want to see if post/thread count is waning? Liz, ask Josh to run this query and let's find out :) It will report your thread counts and post counts grouped by month since the forum was created.