An open letter to Tinypic.

[bluestarultor]

Okay, you guys at Photobucket have not one, but two nice services, and I use them both all the time. I have a Photobucket account for stuff I want to keep around and I use Tinypic for stuff I want to show, but don't want bumping around quite so much. It's a great setup.

Now, I'm a programmer, and I've done web design, too. In fact, I made the City of Mosinee web site for my internship. Which is why I can't understand how it's passed you guys up that your site hasn't been working for a week.

See, you added ReCaptcha to your site, which, while it's a little annoying, I can dig. You just type two words and off you go, and I got used to it. Better I spend five seconds typing a couple words than your servers go down from a DDoS attack. Unfortunately, it's not showing up anymore. I've done a non-cache refresh, still no dice. Your site still wants a code, but there's no code to enter and nowhere to enter it.

I get it, mistakes happen. Maybe you didn't want the service in there anymore, and looking at your page source, there seems to be some "gomez" thing in the header, so maybe you wanted to switch services. No problems there, but come on, guys, it's been a week!

Look, I'm still using Photobucket, and I'm loyal enough that I keep checking Tinypic, but I've been forced to toss my dump art onto ImageShack, which I honestly don't like because of the garbage they put into their code that links back to them a million times and half the time the image doesn't even show up. I get that Tinypic is your free service, and, hey, I get there may have been a bit of confusion with the sign-up thing you just implemented. I understand if you guys are transferring Tinypic account data to Photobucket, but you've had a broken site for longer than is acceptable for one of the top sites on the Internet. It would only take one guy to fix this. Heck, it would take one guy only a few minutes to fix this, and most of that would be figuring out what broke. On top of that, the link to your blog is shot, and Googling up a blog shows the last entry was July 1, before the issue started. I'm not even sure if it's really yours.

The biggest issue here is that, guys, this is really basic. You ALWAYS have a Contact Us link. Even if it goes to Photobucket. So not only has your site been broken for a week, but I'm sure there are tons of people frustrated that they can't even tell you guys.

You guys are one of the biggest sites on the Internet. You run a great service. But you really dropped the ball here, and I only wish this was somewhere you could see it.