Thread: Pictures not showing??

How long ago are we talking about?
Last week/year/decade?

I was looking at a thread I posted back in 2005, but couldn't see the pics.

Two Rietveld inspired zigzag side-tables

Z

A lot of pictures in old threads got 'lost' during an upgrade some time ago.
Sorry about that.TM

Yep, the forum software (vBulletin) basically crapped itself and 1 or 2 pics were lost...
See this post by the Benevolent Dictator: Missing pictures.

There have also been a few hosting sites that have screwed the pooch, so to speak, regarding images disappearing... Photo bucket is one: Photobucket users held to ransom

Zen - I lost over 3000 posted pictures across 2 forums. Fortunately I have a good backup system and I was able to repost some but putting them all back was too much work.

Well that’s some major suckage. The forum was a nice way to document the process and integrate words and images. Thanks for the responses Bob, Junkie and Monster.

If you have valuable pictures keep your own copies, one day "The Cloud" will crash and there will be many many disappointed people

Here's what happened in a nut shell....

Initially we had a number of theories from SEO problem to upgrade problem.

Turned out the main problem was as follows:
It was a major brain fart by vBulletin that did the deletions. The rough story goes something like this: They included a script or something similar in an update, which in rough words deleted photo's that it deemed to unused ie had not been viewed for so many weeks or something along those lines.

Big problem is that they didn't tell anyone about this and it took some 3 - 4 mths for it to be noticed and by this time the damage had been done, not just to WWf but to all forums around the world who installed that particular upgrade. The photos were deleted completely and in some instances completely destroyed some forums who relied almost entirely on photos.

Had vBulletin let their users know up front or early enough the problem may well have been able to be averted, but they didn't, so it wasn't.

We keep photos and other attachments on a separate secure site and everything is backed up twice a day. If we could have restored them we would have done.

When we found out about the problem we gave the members a heads up and allowed them access to their posts to replace missing pics but most didn't realise they had lost them until much much later when they had been physically removed by the program. I replaced a number of photos in a couple of forums but without any assistance from posters it was almost impossible. To add to the woes there was a change in the way SEO links were written which compounded the problems even further.

That glitch in the vBulletin upgrade caused catastrophic loss to thousands of forums around the world and even caused many forums to disappear from the internet.
We asked people to store their photos with us instead of off site because there had been a big loss of photos over the years due to hosting sites closing down and posters closing down their own sites where pics were stored, etc. At least if they were stored with us they could be restored by the original poster if something like that happened, but anly a handful ever restored their posts.

Cheers-Neil

PS I would have given anything to have been able to get the photos back where they belonged. But it just wasn't possible.

Thanks for that Neil

and thanks for all the many hours that you have dedicated to this forum... much appreciated

I have been ... distracted.. for a while and was just looking back at the forum to also discover this
I have all the pics from the Redbird thread that I started many years back and given that over it got over 30k views I feel obliged to re-photo the thread if I can?

What do I need to be to do to get them back online ...sorry I'm s far behind the eightball
Cheers
Ramps