How difficult would it be for the forum itself to be configured to accept uploaded photos directly?
To be
BLUNT - and no offense meant to you, but this has come up before and I have not addressed it as I should have.
Configuring the forum to allow photo uploads is not hard. As Fred mentioned, we already did that.
The problem is one of
MONEY and
LAZINESSFirst, most people, even when they used Photobucket, would upload a photo of 4 or 5 megs - and you can see that on the forum when you have to scroll up and down and side to side to just see it. Few if any took the time to learn how to resize a photo so it would show up on nicely on the forum. Then, several call makers, would post 37 5 meg photos of the call they made last night. 48 of the one they made today, and Lord help me if the wood had a little figure in it you might end up seeing 123 photos of the same call. OK - I exaggerate - but the point is, all those photos take up disk space, and they make it hard to navigate the forum.
Second - This is a
FREE forum. Long ago I tried to charge people who ran companies to advertise here, but the uproar was so great that I gave up, and now as then, I fund the entire forum out of my own pocket. You might think Facebook is free - but you are paying for it every time you log on. They sell every thing they know about you to whoever has the money to pay for it. INCLUDING the US Government.
But anyway, I funded the forum out of my pocket and we were growing very quickly and had a ton of traffic. So much so that we had several offers from companies to buy the forum.
The disk space we were using at the time because of the traffic was quickly approaching our limit,so I had to upgrade out hosting plan to allow us to have more space at a significant additional cost. That upgrade put us at the limit of what our current provider could offer, and the next step would have been to buy or rent our own servers, at a much more significant cost, and that was just something I was just not comfortable bearing myself.
So, while things are slow, I have opened up photo hosting here. I had to set some limits on it, and I am sure it pissed some people off.
But here's something to consider. Everyone is looking for a photo hosting company - and that's just plain dumb. For $4.95 a month, you can get a web site in your own name from dozens of places, and that will allow you to host your own photos. You can then post them where ever you want, and you have complete control over them. Now if you want something for free, well, I guess Facebook, or putting up with the limitations of this forum are your best bet.
Al @ THO