What we have here is a mess. We had this bomb dropped on us and now we are picking up the pieces.
It started in the old days with lots, but not all, folks posting photos on the Buck Forum from regular computers. PB was free, seemed to work well and several of us recommended it to new comers, never thinking - 1. The ads and speed would become almost unbearable and 2. - They would drop the, no third party posting without big dollars, bomb with very little to no forewarning. And as my time here has passed many of the members began using phones to visit the forum and even post photos. PB was being used in that method also by many. As pointed out by Bert early in this trauma; all the use of PB was always subject to some type of melt down. As we have learned if you weren't keeping your photos on your own machinery, you were taking a big risk. I store and edit my photos using Photoshop, but my PB shots were 'fixed up fancy' and were the copies I used here and other places. When you have 2,000 original photos, most at 10 to 12 MG it takes a lot of memory. I used a desk top with extra big memory so I was good but you folks with phone photo storage can't always do that, so PB came onto the scene. As my first desktop died I learned a lesson and even began using an external backup drive to store everything. Today the thumbdrive has gotten almost as large as my old backup drive. So, when PB went screwy I was not perfect but OK. I will now have to pay a monthly fee to PB to keep my photos visible on the Buck forum or take the large amount of time to load and then link the same photos using a new 3rd party hostess I have selected.
No matter what you use to store your third party photos, free or at a small cost (or large) you are taking a chance. You phone folks need to figure out a hard machine you own to store your photos for safety. You big computer folks need capacity to store photos on you desktop, BUT also consider a external memory of some type. Granted we may not be pro photographers but your photos are important to you and you can't let some cloud service provider hold your only copies.......... Even if the service is free.
I was trying to figure out a way to use BF Media area for posting storage thinking if BF burns then we all go down with the ship. But remember there are other knife sites you could go to even if the unthinkable happened.
Find a way to post you photos, protect them in secure storage, give feedback on positive experiences. Let's not let this cause a decline in the Buck forum users or the good photos that you show here. 300Bucks