The issue may not be with anything technically wrong with Photobucket, but rather, it may be more with how the rest of the Internet interacts with Photobucket.
Photobucket increased the amount of ad content, including popups, hotlinks to advertisers, etc, last year. If you access Photobucket, for example, and you aren't a paid account holder, you're likely to see the content. If you have a paid account, Photobucket doesn't present it to you. Now, let's go one step further: We take a link for an image at Photobucket and insert it in a post somewhere else in the Internet, like a post here in the forum. When someone calls up that post, he makes a call over the Internet to Photobucket. Photobucket has no way of knowing whether that person calling up that link is a paid customer, and so, the ad content is liable to get posted. Depending on things like security at the page where the link is posted, or network security, the page containing the post and link may filter out the replies coming from Photobucket. I see this myself, when I am at work, logged in to my company's network and then accessing the Internet. We have web filters installed to block out ad content and streaming content. Often when I am in a forum and I view a post that contains an image linked at Photobucket, I'll see my browser's progress indicator (eg, a spinner or some other icon that shows the browser is doing something) as it tries to resolve the link and its content. And then the browser completes, giving up, basically, because either the content--not just image, but the rest of the content associated with that page at Photobucket--violates the rules of our web filter, or, it times out trying to show the additional content that does pass the filter. But when I'm at home, on my own Internet connection, I can see those images.
This additional ad content has caused a lot of consternation among users, and I'm not sure there is any resolution other than for Photobucket to drop it or change it to some form that doesn't cause other pages around the Web to reject it.
That's my educated guess about what's happening, in any case, based on my own observations. I have no problems, myself, when I access my Photobucket account and the images I have stored there. I have a paid subscription, so I don't get the ad content, though I see it when I first access the page, before I log in and authenticate. But I read post after post from people who have just the free account and who have had to deal with this since last year.
Prost!
Brad
