Not sure how many have heard the news, but about a week ago Photobucket decided with minimal warning to start charging uses an extortionate $399 per year to be able to store photos and share them on websites. This has meant that an uncountable amount of websites globally have been affected, including the likes of ebay and amazon (and our club of course). It's highly unlikely anyone will pay that amount, resulting in thousands (likely tens of thousands) of forums losing most of the images. This certainly is a big blow to communities as it means topics in forums with how to guides / pictures from events etc. no longer have images and it depends on individual users downloading their images and editing all of those posts to get the images back, which is a highly unlikely thing to happen.
For our site, we do have the ability to upload images directly to this site (there's a filesize limit of about 3mb per image to help with storage capacity and also help pages load in a reasonable amount of time). No doubt, some (including my own project) threads are now mostly useless without images
There are talks of class action lawsuits as effectively users are being held to ransom and are being asked to pay disproportionate amounts (that recent virus that hit the globe (wannacry) was only a $300 one off ransom). Perhaps the courts will decide that they need to honor existing users / charge reasonable amounts and at least the old posts will come back to life. Will be an interesting thing to watch...
