It's the loss of build threads, reviews and tutorial type posts that bothers me the most. The forum is fun as a daily chat, but its real strength is the detailed wisdom collected over the years.
My damage limitation strategy goes like this:
- Download* each of my PB Albums, so I have the photos locally, with the random filename as allocated by PB and used within tags in the text of my posts.
- Transfer each album to another site.
- edit old posts where it matters or I care. I would do this by finding a post, clicking on Edit, copying all the text, and pasting it into Word. I would then run a carefully-crafted Word macro** which would search for each occurrence of the text [b]<photobucket.com><account name><folder path>[/b] and replace it with [b]<new site url><new account name><new folder path>[/b], save it as plain text and copy it back to the clipboard so I could re-paste it into the edit window.
So far, I have restored just one file, my avatar picture, now hosted on this site, where it belongs. At least I shan't be displaying PB's nasty little misleading image on every post I make.
* Photobucket traffic permitting. It was ok earlier but at present, their captcha authentications are expiring before their download script responds, which is not good. I guess users in other countries are doing the same thing.
** Macro not yet crafted. I used to be able to do that sort of thing but have not needed to for years. Help from more IT-literate users is welcomed.
My damage limitation strategy goes like this:
- Download* each of my PB Albums, so I have the photos locally, with the random filename as allocated by PB and used within tags in the text of my posts.
- Transfer each album to another site.
- edit old posts where it matters or I care. I would do this by finding a post, clicking on Edit, copying all the text, and pasting it into Word. I would then run a carefully-crafted Word macro** which would search for each occurrence of the text [b]<photobucket.com><account name><folder path>[/b] and replace it with [b]<new site url><new account name><new folder path>[/b], save it as plain text and copy it back to the clipboard so I could re-paste it into the edit window.
So far, I have restored just one file, my avatar picture, now hosted on this site, where it belongs. At least I shan't be displaying PB's nasty little misleading image on every post I make.
* Photobucket traffic permitting. It was ok earlier but at present, their captcha authentications are expiring before their download script responds, which is not good. I guess users in other countries are doing the same thing.
** Macro not yet crafted. I used to be able to do that sort of thing but have not needed to for years. Help from more IT-literate users is welcomed.
