Photobucket Drops (free) 3rd Party Hosting Support
Wonder why your Photobucket images won't post to the forums?
Some time earlier this year, Photobucket stopped supporting free "3rd Party Hosted" images. 3rd Party Hosting is what the Ford Raptor Forum does when it allows you to link your Photobucket images to forum posts and replies. This explains why there are so many dead links to Photobucket hosted images in the forums here. It's really gotten very bad with all free Photobucket account images linking to an image that reads:
"
PLEASE UPDATE YOUR ACCOUNT TO ENABLE 3RD PARTY HOSTING":
Enter
www.photobucket.com/P500 into your favorite browser and link to a Photobucket subscription page asking you to pay $400 for Photobucket's "PLUS 500" subscription plan. It's the only plan allowing Photobucket account holders to post images to sites like FordRaptorForum.com.
It's infuriating.
The work around is to post links from alternative image hosting sites, such as:
Screencast
Flickr
Tumblr
Google+
Blogspot
Snapfish
Shutterfly
Photoblog
Minds
Kinja
Imgbb
Dropbox (with caveats)
Here is an image of my truck loaded from Screencast under its "free" account:
Here is the same image loaded from my Dropbox account:
Note: To make Dropbox images display as actual images you have to modify your copied Dropbox link from (in my case):
https://www.dropbox.com/s/r67i2i8zdx1y2b4/IMG_2051.JPG?dl=0
to:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/r67i2i8zdx1y2b4/IMG_2051.JPG?raw=1
In other words, the "www.dropbox.com" portion of your link will need to be changed to "dl.dropboxusercontent.com". I also replaced the "?dl=0" to "?raw=1" at the end of the link. (Please, don't use the quotation marks.)
Thankfully, the Forums here autosize oversized images.
If you must use Photobucket and have a spare $400 laying around to spend for the privilege of linking to your images, more power to you! For the rest of you, there are a number of ways to circumvent Photobucket (listed & linked above) that may get you started down the road to a more cost affordable solution. The list isn't exhaustive by any means and your milage may vary.
Be sure and test before committing to a particular image hosting service to ensure it is compatible with this and the other forums you use.