It's time to obliterate the Photobucket ransom images

rhombus · **on:** January 01, 2018, 01:27:47 AM

Good evening and happy New Year, everyone.

After discussing the matter with the other admins it has been decided that action needs to be taken to resolve the lingering glut of Photobucket ransom icons in the Caption topics of the forum. To assist in this effort we have given special editing rights for the Caption Me sections to Ducky123, DarkHououmon, Fyn16, and Littlefoot505. They will be tasked with retrieving images from Photobucket wherever possible and, where that isn't possible, to move dormant caption topics to the Old Captions archive. Though they will have some limited moderator powers over those sections they will not be moderators, and should not be asked to deal with spam or other moderator-related tasks.

With that in mind, we certainly wish our new "Photobucket Obliterator" team all the best as they take on the Herculean task of removing Photobucket's ransom from much of our forum.

We admins are certainly grateful for the efforts they are willing to take on behalf of the forum.

Update: Edited to note Littlefoot505's addition to the group.

Sneak · **Reply #1 on:** January 01, 2018, 07:10:13 AM

Good luck!

Littlefoot505 · **Reply #2 on:** January 01, 2018, 11:07:35 AM

That’s awesome! I’ll continue to help as my time allows (even though I’m not in the group)

Rhombus: Now you are. I had failed to notice the full extent of your efforts to retrieve images until I skimmed through them. There are easily several dozen images there.

Littlefoot505: Thanks, man!

Ducky123 · **Reply #3 on:** January 02, 2018, 09:43:25 AM

The evil swimmer shall use his powers wisely to kick photobucket in the...

Well, it's an honour to be given such a task and I shall live up to my nick name to get rid of these annoying photobucket pictures!

PS: Love the image for my new member group as well

Hypno · **Reply #4 on:** January 02, 2018, 09:16:43 PM

You go guys...Photobucket needs to be obliterated as soon as possible!

Littlefoot505 · **Reply #5 on:** January 03, 2018, 10:14:24 AM

Well now I am in the group. You’re going down, Photobucket!! Especially when I get back from vacation later this month!

ddmkm122 · **Reply #6 on:** January 03, 2018, 12:40:46 PM

Congratulations, guys! Use your Powers wisely.

Flathead770 · **Reply #7 on:** January 03, 2018, 09:23:07 PM

Congratulations and good luck everybody. I'm glad to see Littlefoot505's inclusion into this. I don't go into the caption section too often but it was great to see him trying to preserve the images.

Littlefoot505 · **Reply #8 on:** January 04, 2018, 09:55:23 AM

Quote from: Flathead770 on Jan 3 2018, 08:23:07 PM

Congratulations and good luck everybody. I'm glad to see Littlefoot505's inclusion into this. I don't go into the caption section too often but it was great to see him trying to preserve the images.

Thanks! At first, I wasn’t included, but then once Rhombus saw how many pictures I had recovered, he decided to include me. I probably post in the caption section more than any other section on here, and I got tired of seeing all those ransom images. I was especially frustrated because I never got to see them before Photobucket got all greedy on us.

Quote

Congratulations, guys! Use your Powers wisely.

Don’t worry. We will!

Littlefoot505 · **Reply #9 on:** January 27, 2018, 06:01:02 PM

There's been a huge new development in the obliteration process. I got a very reliable Firefox add-on for recovering the images, and it's been helping A LOT! All the other PB obliterators need to get it (you can also get it for Chrome and Opera). The only downside is that it makes it harder to tell what photos need recovering (to fix that, I'm going to just browse the caption sections in a browser where I don't have that extension, then copy and paste the URLs of the threads into Firefox and work my magic from there, or else disable and re-enable it as needed)

Here's how to save the images with the add-on:
- Make sure you have it installed and enabled
- Right-click on the image and click "Copy image location"
- Paste the URL into a new tab
- If it takes you to the Photobucket page, right-click the image again and click "View image"
- If it takes you straight to just the image, or after clicking "View image" on the PB page, copy the URL in the address bar (do NOT right-click the image and click "Copy image location" like you did before; the URL should have "?hotlinkfix=xxxxxxxx" at the end) and paste it into your image hosting site's 'Upload by URL' page, or save the image to your computer and upload it to your preferred site from your computer.

Download links:
Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/photobucket-fix/?src=api
Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kegnjbncdcliihbemealioapbifiaedg
Opera: https://addons.opera.com/es/extensions/details/photobucket-hotlink-fix

Also, I accidentally put a few animation captions in the Announcement section, so if an admin wouldn't mind, I'd appreciate if they could move the captions to the Animation caption section. Please don't kill me or take away my obliteration privileges!

rhombus · **Reply #10 on:** January 28, 2018, 12:44:18 AM

No worries about the misplaced captions, I have moved them back into the proper category.

As for the firefox add-on, that is an excellent find and I can't wait to try it out!

As our previous method of caption retrieval was beginning to run into trouble it is excellent that another method has presented itself. Hopefully this method continues to work until all of the images have been retrieved.

Littlefoot505 · **Reply #11 on:** January 28, 2018, 01:38:04 AM

Quote from: rhombus on Jan 27 2018, 11:44:18 PM

No worries about the misplaced captions, I have moved them back into the proper category.

Thanks, man! I was tired and not on my game today. But no hard feelings, right?

Quote

As for the firefox add-on, that is an excellent find and I can't wait to try it out! As our previous method of caption retrieval was beginning to run into trouble it is excellent that another method has presented itself. Hopefully this method continues to work until all of the images have been retrieved.

I too am really happy that I found that Firefox add-on. There was another one that I'd found before, but it didn't work even half as well as the one I found today. Before I found that one, almost all of the times I'd try to upload PB images to my Postimg, it would just put the speedo in there, which is why I kept having to painstakingly extract the thumbnails and upload them instead.

Now I don't see a single one of those pesky speedo images, and I'm able to fairly easily save the actual pictures to Postimg! I sure am glad I put the thumbnails alongside the speedos instead of replacing them. I've also deleted most of the thumbnails from my Postimg, just so that it'll be less confusing if there ever comes a need for Postimg obliterators.

Here's one neat little random thing that came from this: I finally got to see Littlefoot1616's avatar, and that inspired me to put those cute GIFs into my signature (heck, maybe I'll even use one as my avatar like he does!)

Ducky123 · **Reply #12 on:** January 28, 2018, 01:08:28 PM

Awesome!

Littlefoot505 · **Reply #13 on:** February 11, 2018, 03:28:35 PM

I think Photobucket might be starting to crack down on that add-on. I just had a ransom image get uploaded to my Postimg when I tried to recover one of the caption images by copying the URL with the "hotlinkfix" thingy. However, I was able to recover it by downloading it to my computer and uploading it from there. I just thought that would be worth mentioning.

EDIT: I think it was just a fluke with that one image. I've subsequently been able to recover several images without a hitch.