So I was pleasantly - and profoundly - surprised to discover all my broken photo links were restored both here on RBE and on my Obsidian Portal campaign wiki. Apparently last year's attempt to extort users for $400.00 in fees annually to link to photos from a third-party website cost the CEO his job. The charge dropped to a more modest thirty bucks a year for two gigs of storage, third-party linking, and no more intrusive, speed-sucking ads.
I have no idea if this strategy will keep Photobucket solvent - they claims tens of millions of users, but how many of those actively use their accounts? - in an online environment very different from the one in which the company, and the concept of photo-hosting, was created. I went ahead and signed up, for if nothing else, maybe it buys me enough time to migrate my images to a more stable platform.
In the meantime, I get to be not-as-embarrassed by the state of my meager sites, so that's something, I suppose.
