Westeron Restored

[Bragallot]

It's quite a thorn in my side that basically all my old threads have broken pictures in them due to Photobucket changing their policy.

However it's become pretty easy to download them off Photobucket, so I may take the best ones from each battle and repost them as battle reports, in a slightly different style. For the more recent ones I did I'd lean towards simply 'fixing' them though.

I do intend to continue both story lines (fantasy and scifi) and a lot of people weren't around when I did the first battles and it's probably fresh to them so I think it'll be good if they can experience the history of my part of Medivo in a new way.

I'll tag these threads with 'Westeron Restored' to avoid confusion as to what's old and what's new.

Maybe I'll retake some pictures or add some new ones showing things that originally happened 'off screen' in between as well. Remasters are all the rage, after all.

Since I don't have space to set up a new battle I'll focus on this now. Something to keep in mind is that the new threads are the 'official canon' now. No major plot lines will change since I'm obviously still using the old pictures, but there were some inconsistencies in the original threads around the naming of factions, deities, etc. (which I've gone back and fixed to a degree but you never know) which shouldn't be a problem anymore.

[stubby]

However it's become pretty easy to download them off Photobucket, so I may take the best ones from each battle and repost them as battle reports, in a slightly different style. For the more recent ones I did I'd lean towards simply 'fixing' them though.

Has it? I've tried to scrape a bunch of people's photobucket photos and move them to the brikwars server over the past couple years, but it was always a giant pain in the ass since the batch download button was sabotaged not to work. If they've fixed that, I can start fixing old posts en masse.

[Bragallot]

I can select them and download them as a zip file. The painful part is that they're not in the right order once I have them in a file. Nothing I can't get around, but it takes extra time.

Maybe you need to be logged in for that to work properly, though?

[stubby]

Nah it looks like they've just done some gigantic updates since the last time I checked. When they first introduced the download-a-zipfile function, I was able to login and use it for about a week, but then they figured out that everyone was offloading their files and sabotaged the function for a couple years so that it would just send you down an ad hellhole and never actually deliver a file. You had to go to each image page individually, wait for two minutes worth of ads loading, and then hope it would finally give you the image before the site timed out from all the ads. It was a nightmare.

I'm going to go back in now and see if I can start scraping everybody's files. Hopefully I was smart and wrote the forum TOS in the right way to give myself rights to re-host everybody's content.

[Bragallot]

Yeah I remember running into the same problem the first time I tried to fix my threads.

Well if it helps I'm giving you written permission, LOL.

[stubby]

Welp - logged in, not logged in, different browsers, different computers, still doesn't work. Even tried copying photos to my own Photobucket to download from there; no luck. Not sure what you've figured out that I haven't.

Quick google of download photobucket "something didn't click" shows at least I'm not alone.

Once I have the files, it's easy to go into old posts and just do a text editor search-and-replace from //i1004.photobucket.com/albums/af170/Bragallot/ to //brikwars.com/forums/images/Bragallot/ (or whatever) and instantly update all the image links. It's just getting the images off of Photobucket in the first place that's brutal.

[Bragallot]

I haven't really figured anything out. I just click the ones I want, then click the download button from the top menu. I can't imagine you're doing anything much different. Weird.

Maybe I should download them and send them to you?

[stubby]

Ah, that explains it. I've seen this mythical top menu in screenshots, but I'm still stuck in the old interface and it won't let me upgrade to the new one.

Aaaaand now Photobucket won't load for me at all. I can't believe how much time I've wasted over the past decade trying to get basic functionality out of that butthole of a site. Photobucket: 0/10

Anyway I'll set up a google drive folder for you to dump your images into, and we'll see how it goes.

[Bragallot]

Yeah, if only we'd known. All the more reason I don't even want to give them five bucks a month. The main reason of course still being that I'm a total scrooge.

Roger.

[Venge]

Honestly Photobucket is up there with my health insurance company in terms of companies I hate with a burning passion. Brag and Warhead's stuff was so much fun to read when I was a young teen and I still go back and look at it sometimes. Those two really got me into BrikWars and it is a huge shame that their photos are now covered in ugly watermarks or just don't work at all. Such a shame that future BrikWarriors may not get to read their battles in their full glory.