Profile Badges & Photobucket

[arrowrat]

We had, until today a lot of Profile Badges. They have disappeared over night and we are left with a white square with a small blue square containing a question marker in the centre of it.

We know that Photobucket started to charge ~£100 a year for an account so understand why a lot of cachers stopped using it.

Does anyone know of a way around this as we do like to have the badges on our profile?

Thanks

Val & Steve aka Arrowrat

[Bear and Ragged]

Keep them on Groundspeak pages.

Start a cache page and archive it. Then use it to store your badges/images in logs.
The badges can be linked with the GS image link.

[arrowrat]

Thanks for your response but please can you be more specific. The badges our on our Public Profile page which we believe is within Groundspeak as you suggested. WE aren't sure what you mean by start a cache page & archive it. Sorry for being naive.

[Antreid]

The owner of the badge has to take the action. Your profile contains links to their badges, and it is those links that have failed. The badge owner can do as B&R suggests, and send out new badge code. Many COs have done this on the relevant cache page (harder for events). Contact the CO to tell them, if they don't already know and haven't fixed their code on their cache page.

If you can access the original badge somehow, then you can take action too. Download it, then you can upload that to something (anything) on the Groundspeak site, as B&R suggests, and change the bad links on your profile. Not a quick or easy task.

[arrowrat]

Thanks for this. We understand it until we get to 'that to something (anything) on the Groundspeak site,' Do you mean upload it to our log for the particular cache we have the badge for? Sorry for being a bit thick but we don't see how we could do this for say 1000/2000 finds etc.
Cheers
Val & Steve

[Antreid]

It's the bit that B&R said:

Start a cache page and archive it. Then use it to store your badges/images in logs.
The badges can be linked with the GS image link.

But yes, you can also upload it to any log - eg for an archived cache - and that would work too. When it's uploaded you can usually right-click and open in a new tab, which will give you the new link you use in your profile.

[Maple Leaf]

Arrowrat.

Have a read of this page on the old Follow the Arrow website (now hosted by GAGB). If you scroll down the page, it will tell you about Adding images to a page.

http://follow-the-arrow.gagb.org.uk/htmlcodes.html

As long as the image is uploaded somewhere onto the Groundspeak (Geocaching.com) website - either in a log or content of a cache page / archived cache, then you will be able to link to it and add a 'badge/image' to your profile page. You can host the image elsewhere (like the PhotoBucket), but it's easier just to keep on the Geocaching.com website.

[Antreid]

Also this was kind of covered briefly in Seeker last year (https://gagb.org.uk/uploads/Seeker/seeker33.pdf#page=18). Although that was aimed at the cache/event owners, what Jen and others are saying is right for you too - just get the image uploaded *somewhere* on Groundspeak's site, and avoid hosting it somewhere else.