Very well said akmc_in_au. Let me flame back this type of post and Temper Tantrum attention seeking person.
I was going to say enjoy those the free sites that have all the annoying spammy ads you'll love(and anyone who comes to see you. Then you get screwed like photo bucket but others beat me to it. That lovely company who broke the numerous forums and destroyed years of educational posting on numerous hobbies. $399.99 per year......Enjoy that deal
Try viewing it without an ad blocking, that PB demand you shut down to see your photos or the images they locked down on numerous forums. You'll find Facebook has great photo hosting with constant """innovation"" aka changes rammed down your throat. PhotoBuck finally beat Image Shacks's frog for the most despised image swap advertisement for a photo hosting site. If you can't figure out while "Google images" are free, you might not understand you are the product being sold. Pbase never used your images and information to sell you out to the data miners. Google on the other hand....
I can't remember which company it was it was, but back when PBase was one the biggest in 3 main photo hosting services( as PC World, Computer Shopper , Wired and several others listed them them in the top 3-5 websites to use circa 2002 when direct linking was rare and people didn't have digitalimagesof themselves oronly a couple), That other Big Photo Hosting Company was one that went belly up. They just shut down it down, one day no warning. No word for a 1-2 weeks, refused to allow limited access for people to get their images back. It would cost too much to put the servers back online for access but they had your data if you wanted to pay. Many didn't back up to multiple hard drives and uploaded directly from their camera and then foolishly deleted the images.... People could get their images but you had to pay them $70-80 usa dollars per CD(700MB) and people had several cds worth due to all the uncompressed originals. Thousands lost all their images. That ripple was felt through the Photograph community and Pbase welcomed them with open arms with free unlimited storage accounts.
That was back when you knew if PBase was having issues when university finals testing was happening Slug wouldn't be as quick due to taking his tests. Then were issues at Christmas where everyone pretty much DOS attacked the site with all their Christmas images and especially on their big brand new 4-5 megapixal camera...
The person gripes about paying Pbase to be left alone, not have the interface constantly tweaked, not to have them constantly trying to find new ways to monetize you and harass the people viewing your images. They upgrade the back end, make offsite back ups, replace server array hard drives and leave people alone . With a interface they can use CSS to make their Account's pages as complex or as simple as they want.
I'm staying here, I paid to support this site for several years when it was free with no account size limit and people used it upload their whole hard drive(s) of images they saved . Because of the great work the owners did, I volunteered my time in the forms to answer numerous questions and help people. So did others while taking heat from frustrated people who ddidn't understand how to do something. Pbase never intended the forums to be used for communication by the admins. I caught the PAD people's trick with how they were scamming voting for popular images. The list goes on and on. I've paid several years in advance and plan to to do another 5-10 soon. The upside is when I no longer can pay hence my life is over, my account will go into memorial status, and the direct links will stay working. Is there a risk PBase and Slug & Emily may not last a long life, yes but they will live longer than me and everyone I photographed & uploaded here for the most part. Nothing lasts forever but this site outlasted Aol hometown, geocities, and the internet dial provider's(for everyone how many can you still name?) websites people built hosting their images. I wish Pbased allowed video files but that type of storage brings issues. Uploading pdfs would be nice but if i want all that I need to rent some server space and run my own website because it is beyond sharing pictures with other people.
I could probably type out at least 15-20 places people were leaving PBase for that are no longer there. If PBase is so bad and trival, why did you have Flounce off in such a big huff? Not that I expect answer..... You're lurking around hoping someone will say stay, you'll get some attention. If you have been here and are as knowledgeable as you claim, you know which email address are answered . They're pretty easy to find. ** Hint** Hint*** the Help pages have them listed. But you wanted attention not help with a real issue. You want to have a full website with all the bells and whistles , feel free. Paying for hosting services with a your own domain isn't that expensive, unless you're popular.... PBase doesn't punish people for traffic from them asses viewing the images, never had bandwidth limit for 24 hours or per week unless you were doing something pretty large and abusing the site for hosting services for large scale commercial. Looking at page views totals, you aren't that big.
Wait
shadytree is from the Uk that explains is whininess. Leaving so so so so much, that they deleted account and their account name...Oh wait they didn't these images are direct link from Pbase. So despite their rants they are still using PBase. Not even their Great new site they are going to.....