Originally Posted by
BobL
I'm a member of a number other forums where many members used Photobucket.
I also post many pictures in those forums that I also post on these forums.
It would make a lot of sense for me to just upload once to Photobucket and then point to the same pictures from each of the forums.
One of the forums that has not been running for very long actively promotes the use of photo bucket since it reduces their storage requirements
I have paid a fortune for storage capacity so we can store and keep safe the pictures on here. In the early days we had to have small file sizes as space was at a premium but now we have more room than we could ever use and it is now cheap enough to buy an extra few gb if needed.
However, after while I noticed that (more on some forums than others) some photos just disappeared.
I subsequently found out these were all Photobucket linked photos.
In several cases his was due to members spitting the dummy with a forum and removing their photos from Photobucket so the links no longer worked.
This was most unfortunate because some of these photos were from prolific posters with excellent ideas that I was accessing over and over and often referred other members to these photos.
The removal of the photos made the text virtually useless/
My point exactly.
After personally heavily promoting that photos should be uploaded direct to each forum something even worse happened to one of the forums. It was hacked and they lost everything.
Eventually they recovered the posts and membership data but not the links between the photos uploaded to the forum and the posts on the forum.
Now the only photos that remained visible were those members who had uploaded their photos via Photobucket and maintained their Photobucket account!
Hacking of forums usually occurs because forums aren't updated regurly even after highly publicised warnings of vulnerabilities.
We upgread whenever there is an upgrade available and thus make it much safer for content and members.
If photo's are uploaded properly then they will always be available to be restored evan after acatastrofic problem of any sort. Not only that the forums are backed up 4 times per day so the worst that can happen, even in the worst case scenario could be the loss of 6 hours of posts.
Dammed if you and dammed if you don't. Dead right there Bob.
Ultimately it comes down to trust.
Members to spit the dummy and pull their photos, OR the benevolent dictators of the forum to look after their system.
We have lost lots of pictures in the past due to off site storage crashing and losing pics and people moving to different off site storage. Lost hundreds of pictures years ago when an of site storage site shut down. Can't remember the name of the site but it caused no end of problems on here and was the reason why we originally asked for pics to be loaded onto these forums instead of being linked to other sites.
As far as making the picture visible to non-members, all they have to do is register, not a hard thing to do. Exactly.