photobucket / 3rd party hosting

[djm16]

While it is pretty annoying that Photobucket should change their terms and conditions so radically and without warning, they do have a point. Storage and bandwidth cost money, so why should they continue footing the bill for forums like ours to run more cheaply by hosting our bandwidth-hogging pictures?

We should move to inline pictures, not hosted pictures. That way the preservation of our useful content is more guaranteed. If that starts to cost more money from Proboards, then I guess we should pay up. Yes I know that as a guest user I am paying nothing, but maybe that should change too.

Does Proboards have a way of limiting posted pictures to 100kB? A 800x600 picture can be compressed with minimal loss of resolution to 30-80kB.

[David]

Jul 22, 2017 2:47:59 GMT djm16 said:

Does Proboards have a way of limiting posted pictures to 100kB? A 800x600 picture can be compressed with minimal loss of resolution to 30-80kB.

Unfortunately not. The 'minimum' is 1mb, though I have posted in the past asking members to keep their photos below 250kb - any exceeding this are removed. In light of the Photobucket issues, the club has looked into increasing storage on this forum for photos and will instigate this, should our current limit be exceeded. But, nothing is free, so there is a monthly cost involved and bearing in mind this is fully paid up club members money, being used to assist and benefit those who are not club members, we have to strike a balance.

[OlafR]

Being a P5 club member, I'd actually rather pay more to have all pictures stored right where they belong (HERE!).
I suppose whoever posted a picture here has gone through that hassle of finding an external hoster (there's probably a ton of different ones that have been used over the years!). It doesn't only spoil the "user experience" (being annoying at best) but rather turns people away. And then, when you finally found a way, the hoster ceases to exist or simply changes their terms ...

Cheers,
Olaf