Jessica M.

I think I got sucked into this survey site because after doing some online shopping, a popup asked me to review my experience. I guess I wasn't paying attention and didn't uncheck the box to join up. At first I thought I would try it and the experience was pretty good at first. I racked up about 1100 points and then I stopped having any success with any of the surveys given to me. I get emails from them about new surveys but upon starting them am told that I don't qualify. It'll find me new ones with the promise of "Based on your profile, you qualify for this survey." Okay, that sounds good. I haven't answered many questions of the new survey when I'm suddenly kicked out and told I'm not a good fit or I don't qualify. So they think I qualify based on my profile, but then I actually don't. And, yes, my profile is pretty much complete, so there's no excuse there. I thought it was fun at first but now it's really off-putting to be wasting my time for nothing. I haven't been able to finish a survey and get compensated for them in months. Not sure what I can do with the 1100 points. I was told a few more surveys can get me an eGift Card. How many more is "a few"? Not sure I want to continue if I'm just never going to be able to successfully complete any of these surveys anymore.

I've had an account with Photobucket since around 2004 or so. It was free back then, which I really appreciated, but then around 2007 or so, they started cutting the file size limit and bandwidth limit for free accounts. Wasn't happy about that, but it still suited my purposes. About 5 years ago, they started covering your images with a watermark.

In the past year or so, I've been getting emails from them warning me that my account is over limit and I need to log in and delete my photos (or however they worded it) or get a paid account. The last time they sent this email, I logged in and deleted a lot of photos from my account (after downloading/backing them up), but not quite enough to get me into the free account tier. I'm a small business owner and I don't usually get enough time during the day to do things like this as often as I'd like.

Today I received an email from them with the subject "Your photos may be subject to deletion. Verify & secure your account today." The email told me I hadn't accessed my account in some time (really it's only been a couple of months or so?), and I must verify my account to keep it in "active" status. I clicked on the "verify" link, logged in, and ended up at this page with an ugly red background, informing me "Hosting is not allowed. It's time to make a decision, upgrade today or delete your account." There is a "Purchase now" link and underneath it a "or contact support to delete your account."

I think it's disgusting that they're not even giving me an opportunity to access my account so I can save/download/delete any other photos. They might try to justify it as, "Well, we told you many times and we're not giving you any more chances." But I only received two such emails telling me to delete photos or purchase an upgrade. And they never said anything about only giving you x amount of chances before forcing you to upgrade or delete your account. I believe they're not only greedy, but shady as well.

I left them negative feedback on their site along with an email address to contact me, so we'll see if they say anything. At this point I'd rather just delete my account and be done with them... they disgust me that much. I also can't afford a paid account with them. I've been using a better image hosting service for several years now (a FREE one). But I'd like to at least be able to access the photos first. They don't care, though.

I've had a Tumblr blog since 2010. Things used to be great and then the Russian bot accounts (some with porn, some without) that spammed tags made things crazy for a while. It's settled down, but since December 2018 when they started flagging posts for "adult content" it's gone completely around the bend. I have a blog dedicated to an old sci-fi TV show. I make a lot of photo posts, which are completely SFW. Tumblr would flag more than half of them as "adult content." I'd appeal them and they'd get reinstated, but it was very tiring to go slogging through all these posts and have to appeal them. I contacted Support countless times and they were useless. Going through my blog's archive, I recently discovered that posts I'd made 1-2 years ago had been marked as "possible adult content" and were hidden from the public. Clicking on the actual posts came up with "URL not found", meaning they deleted them (below are photos showing what happened). I was never even notified of this. Angrily contacted Support, got their useless "Zendesk" bot with a totally irrelevant reply. I'm just disgusted they've deleted totally innocent, SFW posts without notifying me. In recent days they've laid off flagging my new posts but I'm nearly done with them. I've backed up my blog to Wordpress and will continue updating there. Thanks for turning what was once an enjoyable experience into a nightmare, Tumblr.