More Photosuckit outrage

As a result of the outrage at their attempted extortion, Photosuckit restored the images displayed on forums but asserted their ire by overlaying them with a giant watermark.

Now it seems they've gone a step further (perhaps a step too far) by blurring the image underneath the watermark. You can see the result in this post of mine on the HSM forum...

Miniature faceplate/indexing table

I suppose I'll soon receive an email from them informing me that they will remove the blurring after I send them some huge sum of money.

My response to that will be, "ESAD, Photosuckit!"

I noticed this same thing the other day. They're blurring the images when people exceed a certain bandwidth allotment. At first I thought I was just looking at some very out-of-focus photos, but then I saw them on forums everywhere.

HSM is using the same forum software that we are. Here's the image caching plugin I'm using: https://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=253309 . And then I modified the script to store the cached images both on our server and in a geo-distant Amazon S3 bucket. This gives us multiple backups in different locations, and the images serve faster and more flexibly from the Amazon S3 bucket. I'm happy to share my code modifications with their admin. What he can do is wait until the first of the month, or whenever the Photobucket periodic bandwidth allotment for images is reset, and the images display correctly. Then he can run the caching program to quickly retrieve all of the images.

I appreciate the offer, Jon, but all my posts on HSM are so old I doubt that anyone looks at them anymore; I never receive questions or comments on them. All of the material there is duplicated on this site. They can always contact me to provide photos if desired.

In the future I intend to only use the photo storage associated with each forum.