An Update for our Readers

Today we wanted to update you on some distressing behind the scenes goings on with Third String Goalie.

Years ago when we first discovered the game worn jersey collecting forums online we saw that Webshots was by far and away the image hosting choice for collectors to document and share their jerseys with the collecting community, so we naturally followed suit and began to photograph and upload our images of our jerseys to Webshots as well.

Over the last dozen or so years we have photographed and uploaded nearly 2,700 pictures to Webshots detailing the front and back of our jersey collection as well as each and every patch our jerseys have, as a resource for other collectors.

Later, when we began this website, Webshots became an extremely vital part of creating our articles, as we could simply copy and paste the code associated with our photos to illustrate our stories with images of our jerseys. In fact, the template of this website was modified to accommodate the standard width of the photos supplied by the Webshots code.

While we had our issues with certain aspects of Webshots over time, zero customer service, highly annoying auto-play commercials each time we loaded a page (which we did quite often in the way we used the site), and a a few lost images, we did appreciate the interface they used and the ability to create albums and rearrange images along with the ability to quickly create the code to paste those images into our website.

Unfortunately for us and many others, the original owners of Webshots recently repurchased the site, abandoning the image hosting that we and so many others relied on Webshots for, and are throwing their efforts behind a new site that is based on storing your social media photos in The Cloud. Swell idea.

Except...

the SIX HUNDRED AND NINETY MILLION photos hosted on Webshots, including our 2,700 images, many of which were linked to here on our humble website, were all deleted forever and have now vanished from Third String Goalie.

At least for the time being.

We're not sure how long it will take, but we will select a new image hosting service and will make our best effort to rebuild and repair the damage done to us by Webshots and founders Narendra Rocherolle and Nick Wilder.

It's going to take a criminally long time for us to resize, upload and then title, describe and tag each of our 2,700 images before then searching through our roughly 1,300 posts to identify which Webshots hosted images are missing, generate new codes for embedding and then manually paste them into each article that now contains broken links and no jerseys images thanks to Narendra and Nick. We only wish we could bill them for the damage they have done and the lost time we are going to have to endure fixing the disaster they have brought upon us after we trusted them.

Fortunately we did not put all our eggs in one basket, and have chosen from the beginning to host all of our illustrative images on Photobucket.com, so it could have been much worse than it already is.

We may have to lessen the frequency of our new posts for awhile in order to find the time to fix our previous posts, so bear with us in this time of distress, frustration and linkrot as we work to restore the lost images from Third String Goalie, a project that has suffered a severe blow, but that we still believe in and are committed to.