I've cleared posting about this with the staff, so please bear with me. There's a problem that's going to raise havoc with just about every Internet forum around, and I think we need to be aware of it and start thinking about what we're going to do about it. The name of the problem is Photobucket.
With no prior warning, a lot of photos on MANY forums that were posted as hot links to images hosted on Photobucket have suddenly disappeared, and been replaced with this:
It isn't clear why Photobucket has suddenly done this, but it's safe to assume (I think) that it means they aren't making as much money as they want, and now that they have probably millions of images stored on their site they decided to hold them hostage. The "p500" reference in the image refers to their high-dollar, paid hosting service, which costs $399 per year. They want all of us to pay $399/year so the one or two photos we put up here can be seen by other forum members.
It isn't yet clear how they have implemented the block. I have some photos in threads on another gun forum that are still visible. Other people's photos, on that forum just like on this one, aren't visible. I've seen multiple posts in which some photos are blocked while others are visible. We don't know (yet, anyway) if that means they're using an algorithm to select what to block and some images made the cut, or if they're going after everyone incrementally and the images I can see today will be blocked tomorrow -- or next week, or next month. What IS clear is that this is going to be a nightmare for Internet forum administrators and users alike.
Short term: Another forum, on which I'm a moderator, also uses vBulletin as the forum software. So does this forum. Although both that forum and The Firing Line have always recommended hosting photos on a site such as Photobucket and linking to the images in your posts, both forums now appear to support attaching images rather than linking to them. Starting immediately, it's probably a good idea to start attaching photos rather than linking to Photobucket.
However, I'm not an admin here. If we all start attaching photos, that's likely to increase the site's bandwidth and storage requirements significantly, and that may be a problem. I hope the staff will chime in on that, sooner rather than later. I don't want to step on any toes by suggesting a "solution" that's only going to cause another problem.
Another option, obviously, is to find another free photo hosting site, move all your photos there, and then come back here and edit all your old posts to replace the links. However, for that to work the admins would have to allow us to edit old posts. There are reasons why that's generally disabled on most forums. Possibly there can be a temporary revision of that policy, long enough to allow us a window in which to patch photo links.
What alternate photo site to choose? I don't know -- I'm looking. One that I've heard of is TinyPic. I went to the TinyPic web site, and the first thing I noticed is that it's owned by Photobucket. Ummm ... thanks, but no thanks. I'll keep looking.
If anyone has any further information or insights on this, please join the discussion. If we don't do something, we're going to lose forever access to a lot of valuable images that help explain what people are talking about on Internet forums.