I discovered this last week when I went to WS to check something. Unfortunately I clicked on the link for more information and apparently they downloaded something onto my computer. It removed my WS desktop and kept trying to install the Smile desktop, which I didn't want. Every time I'd boot my computer that msg would come up that it was looking for Webshots. I finally realized they'd installed something and went looking for it. Nothing under Smile but under Webshots I found a Webshots Supplant folder and a Webshots Supplant Launcher.exe. I deleted both those and the popup stopped. I was furious that they put something on my computer without my knowledge or permission. I'd had a lot of WS pics that I'd downloaded over the years and when my computer crashed and we had to reinstall everything, I'd saved all the Webshots Data (with the pic files) onto an external hard drive. So apparently they couldn't get to that. I went in and found them all intact. Of course they're all .wbz files but I'd downloaded a free program. Ultimate Webshots Converter, last year that someone had told me about. It converts the WS pic files to .jpgs. I went into all the WS pic files and converted all to jpgs. I found that I can still use them as wallpaper by opening a jpg in the Windows Picture and Fax Viewer and right clicking on it, you can set it as the desktop background. When they initially zapped all my WS data, suddenly my wallpaper disappeared! A slight shock! There's one particular pic I love....a sea/beach scene, and I had saved it elsewhere so was able to reinstall it as wallpaper.
I was so mad I could have throttled them! I posted it to Treadleon, one of my sm lists and people there started trying to get their pics off. If you haven't, check out the Smile blog.....on the WS page at the top. There have been over a K of very upset WS users screaming at them and threatening lawsuits etc. As many said on the blog, I don't want to use WS as a photo storage space....I have 2 external HD's for that and there are many other sites for that too. WS was a community in many ways....on TO we could post pics of our quilts, sm's etc. and share them, make comments etc. I also used it to post pics of things I was selling on e.g. Craigslist and put in a link to see more pics of the item. Those original owners may think they're doing something special but they don't seem to have any idea of how people were using the site. I did find that I could go in and delete my pics and albums and since I didn't have a lot there and have it all on my computer, it was no loss. But there's a woman on TO who does research on White sm's who had an enormous presence on WS and is having a hard time getting all her stuff off it.
Hope everyone gets their stuff off before it disappears!!