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Thread: Photobucket users held to ransom
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14th July 2017, 05:14 PM #46
I recall this event slightly differently and it was comprehensively covered in this thread. The key explanation as to what happened is in post #28 but to precis something called VBulletin which is used by many forums around the world decided to upgrade or modify its software without bothering to tell anyone first or explain the ramifications behind its actions. The result was a huge loss of pictures in forums worlwide that could never be restored again except by the original posters and caused a great wailing and gnashing of teeth; along with considerable whimpering. Some persons initially believed that this event was triggered by either the Forum owners & mods deliberately dumping old information, or allowing it to happen through negligence or lack of due diligence but evidence emerged showing that VBulletin was the culprit.
I also recall an offer was made to allow original posters editing rights to replace their missing pictures from their original sources; but I'm pretty sure it went into most people's "too hard basket".Nothing succeeds like a budgie without a beak.
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14th July 2017 05:14 PM # ADSGoogle Adsense Advertisement
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14th July 2017, 06:05 PM #47
This isn't the first time Robson Valley has thrown those, totally unfounded, accusations around.
As a moderator and a member of the Admin Team I was just as much affected by this photo disaster as he was, maybe more even.
It defies logic that the Admin Team would deliberately delete thousands of photos and totally ruin so many posts with very valuable information.
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14th July 2017, 07:43 PM #48
The thing I struggled to understand around that whole fiasco was the lack of data monitoring and backups. I work in IT and frankly found it a little unusual that a forum of this size wouldn't have a redundancy plan in place.
I've largely stopped posting photos here now and host them externally because I have zero faith the same thing won't happen again. And honestly the moderators stance on it was rather testy at times considering you'd lost years worth of peoples input.
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14th July 2017, 09:17 PM #49
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14th July 2017, 09:23 PM #50
Yep. And post upgrade you do integrity checks to make sure everything is there. There should have been some pretty huge red flags that something was wrong after the upgrade but I'm guessing there was no backup and therefore no way to compare before to after.
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14th July 2017, 11:04 PM #51
... and the tsunami of 404's generated instantly, which any monitoring system would be having an instant spack about...
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15th July 2017, 01:51 AM #52
These forums are fully backed up twice per day and have been for the past 18 years. The loss of pics had nothing to do with not backing up the forums. It was to do with the deletion of the no longer supported and dangerously vulnerable VBSEO and then the built in redundancy bug in vBulletin upgrade that deleted pictures which it saw as not being used.
This bug was not announced by vB and didn't become apparent to us until weeks after the upgrade and by that time the damage had been done and was irreversible. We were only one of thousands of vBulletin forums to have this problem some were way worse off than us.
There was nothing we could do. By the time the problem was found it was way too late to do anything about it as the pics had been deleted and even if we could have replaced them all from the backup it would have meant we would also have lost few weeks current posts.
To my knowledge no one has been able to restore the lost pics on their forums, not only that but I believe there were many forums that actually closed down because if the problem that was none of their doing.
For those conspiracy theorists who seem to think we for some unknown reason deleted all the photos from the forums in a mass cull....
Are you crazy, what on earth would make you think we would be stupid enough to delete the life blood of the forums.
For what it's worth there are currently 164,919 unique attachments on these forums.KEEP A LID ON THE GARBAGE... Report spam, scams, and inappropriate posts, PMs and Blogs.
Use the Report icon at the bottom of all Posts, PM's and Blog entries.
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19th July 2017, 12:52 PM #53GOLD MEMBER
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Please advise members not to delete images and close their PB accounts. There are at least 2 work-around fixes that may have long-term value.
Still very convoluted with the overburden of adverts, etc. I'm starting over in Post Image.
I do appreciate the one and only detailed explanation for the loss of images. No other forum has done so.
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22nd July 2017, 11:35 AM #54
Explanations of deletions were also posted by me at the below location in May 2016
Missing pictures.
Posts 6 and 28
Cheers - NeilKEEP A LID ON THE GARBAGE... Report spam, scams, and inappropriate posts, PMs and Blogs.
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22nd July 2017, 11:39 AM #55
Okay so it was possible to restore from backups but you didn't want to lose a few weeks worth of posts. Isn't this preferable to losing years worth of photos?
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22nd July 2017, 01:47 PM #56Woodworking mechanic
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Some new photos have been replaced with the photobucket third party warning. Do the OPs who post the link to the photos see the photos in their post or see the Warning.? Anyone know?
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22nd July 2017, 02:32 PM #57
It will depend on whether their cache has been refreshed or not.
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22nd July 2017, 02:50 PM #58
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22nd July 2017, 03:10 PM #59GOLD MEMBER
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No, there's 2 different things here.
1. The image losses as ubeaut explains, related to the change in software.
2. The June 27, 2017 change in the Terms of Usage as announced by Photobucket.
If you clean out your PB account and resign, all photo links to this and other forums are lost.
I'm told, just abandon PB and let it rot in peace.
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22nd July 2017, 03:33 PM #60Woodworking mechanic
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Here's a picture of a current thread with the PB problem. This post was made when things were fine with PB but now, with the thread having had a reply this week, the pics have been replaced with the PB warning.
IMG_0290.jpg
So, if the person who posted or people who have viewed when pics were there and have not cleared their cache, may still see the picture rather than the PB third party warning? Just curious.
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