The main advantage of using an offsite hoster is that you can put your images anywhere within your post, whereas with onsite hosting you are usually limited to a line of pictures with no text to describe what you are doing. Plus, if everyone started to upload pictures to the site, it would soon become bloated and start to get unwieldy and slow.
The way a forum behaves with onsite hosting is a function of software and how the user configures that software. The software issues can be addressed that I'm confident in.
As far as performance goes that is a hardware and software issue. These days one can buy a sever with a massive number of cores and extremely fast storage subsystems so hardware isn't the big issue it use to be. I'm not sure how many are logged in at the moment but lets face it this isn't a site that gets real heavy with many users logged in all at once. Remember there are more than a few people out there that think we are nuts to be Turing chinks of metal into machine and engines.
Frankly in some cases the site might even run faster instead of linking to PB which can be slow and serves up its own ads.
I know I can now continue using PB for another 18 Months without losing any of my posted pictures until then, giving time for me to find somewhere else to host, but after that time, most, if not all pictures will have disappeared from every post on here that relied on PB.
Yes this is what sucks more than anything, I'm already seeing many sites that frankly look like hell with PB obnoxious standing photo. In the end though we really need to reject this move by PB. For me it isn't the annual cost even if the tis grossly expensive, but rather it is the sleazy way they went about implementing this non-sense.
This is a major problem with this site, you cannot go back and edit your old posts to put the pictures back if you do find somewhere else to host them, and unless that issue gets addressed quickly, this site will be an empty shell with plenty of words, but little or no pictures within the next year or so, with no way for us to resurrect it.
I would imagine that is a parameter that can be set easily. That is they could configure to allow updating for an arbitrary number of years. The question is how many people would be willing to go back 3, 5 or even ten years to update a bunch of photo links.
Survival rests with admin allowing us access and us 'fixing things' in our old posts.
That bings up an interesting question, have the forum owners said anything yet with respect to this problem? In the end the forum owners are the only ones that can offer up a real solution.
Has anyone got a better solution to this disaster?
Yes, the forum should host pictures itself. If need be they will have to update or change the forums software to clean up how pictures are handled onsite.
Ultimately they will have to start charging a subscription fee to cover the additional expense of hosting the pictures themselves. If they can keep that fee in line with a decent magazine fee I think they will get enough buy in to remain viable. A lot of hedging with the "think" there because it really depends upon how many active users the site can maintain.
Notably many sites have split access. That is one level, the free one, gets you access to text. If you want the photos you end up having to subscribe. Sure it sucks to have to pay to see a picture but the idea that everything on the net is free needs to die.
There is a second option, that likely won't work, but that is to plaster every single page of the site with advertisements. I'm already running an ad blocker due to the high frustration some sites create, so I don't believe it is a successful path. Frankly many sites have been ruined via heavy advertising so I don't want to see Home Model Engine Machinist going the same way.
