cbaltrin
Just in case you guys have not heard of this. I gooded "Photobucket Hotlink Fix" and it brought up an extension for Chrome that Installed an can now see photobucket photos again. I umderstand other browsers have a fix as well.
It's not a "fix", it's a hack. And eventually PB will figure it out and take steps to shut it down.
It's the latest round in a sort of arms race, if you will, between PB and its customers.
PB wanted to increase revenue, so it implemented an increased volume of popup ads, which people with the free accounts would have to see. Many of those folks chose to use ad blockers, which defeated the purpose of the popup ads and meant that they did not generate the expected revenue. So PB responds by eliminating third-party hosting of images for the free accounts and all of its subscription accounts except for the "Plus 500" account, for which they expect people to pay them $399.99 annually. Now someone has figured out how to tweak the link URLs to get around this. That puts the ball back in PB's court. Since this revenue seems to be important, I suspect that they will counter to block the hack.
I'm not defending their decisions. I think it was a disastrous business decision, to eliminate third-party hosting. PB must be bleeding funds, for them to have taken the decision. But a merchant has a right to charge what he wants, and to make decisions, wise or stupid, right or wrong. We as consumers have the right not to buy his product. I've switched to Postimage.org, for example.