I have spent the last few years rarely blogging.....if i did write things i never found the time to post them...so.....

Although I had noticed that some of my linked pictures were not showing up I thought that it had something to do with my lack of interest in keeping the photo hosting site up to date. It had been several years since I had taken the time to look at it. So imagine my surprise when I discovered the true reason for the nice gray box with:

"PLEASE UPDATE YOUR ACCOUNT TO ENABLE 3RD PARTY HOSTING"

This nice box that had replaced my picture was not due to my error nor due to my online journal changing settings (this had happened in the past so i just assumed that it was a linking/html/data glitch...) NO, this is because of greed....corporate greed.

Evidently, the lovely folks at said photo site had made the brilliant decision to take down all 3rd party links without notice and to then request a butt-load of money to have them returned to working order. I understand the need to cover rising costs but this business model seems just a tad redonkulous.

As I attempted to log into my account to see how many pictures were there and to find out if I could afford to upgrade (not gonna happen....WAY too much money was being requested by these nards) I was bombarded with popup ads....not just the normal annoying "Oh wait sixty secs and it will allow me to close it."

no it was...wait....Whatthe....hang on....gaaaahhhhhhhh

nonstoppoppoppoppoppoppopiamnotgoingtoclosenowyoucantevenseeyourpicturesFFS!!!!!!!!!!!

GRrrrrr. So. I take a great big breath and try to sort this mess. I was on my laptop but the screen could not take the popup craziness and so I head to the PC to see if it is any better. I had hoped that I could block the popups...but they were not to be stopped. Bastards. It was a bit easier to see my pictures as the PC monitor is larger....i did notice at during this onslaught of annoying ads that there was a tiny link offering to remove all ads for ONLY 249 a month. I believe it was $2.49 but my brain saw $249.00 and I nearly fainted. Still, I refuse to pay even a small monthly fee because I would still have the bigger issue of not being able to 3rd party share. The cost of having the pleasure of sharing my OWN pictures from this web host is $400 a year....yeah, i choose decline.

I forgot to mention that had I not been in the mood to update all of my passwords today and gone down that rabbit hole of updating my online presence i would not have stumbled upon the reason for the missing links. And then, before i took that deep breath..put down the laptop...and wandered into the PC..i had had a moment of madness and clicked on "DELETE MY ACCOUNT!!!!!" only to have a little box pop up to tell me it would be deleted in three days....um...WHAT? why 3 days? This makes zero sense. But on the plus side, good that it was not deleted forthwith due to my tantrum. I now have backed up some of the pictures to my PC so that is a good thing.

All in all, it was a learning experience. I had far too many pictures of random crap and now there are less of them. lol I still need to sort out my thousands of photos and then find a safer, economical place to store them.

And now...for a little well deserved sleep.