The impact of PhotoBucket on Redline Derby, future plans

You can get details on the changes imposed by PhotoBucket news from Google but in short, they no longer support direct linking on other sites like redlinederby.com

What this means for the site is that a huge portion of the articles and threads are now without images. PhotoBucket has been the "go to" for most members so I'd say no less than 75% of thread images were hosted there. 

So you'll see this image a lot in the archive...

http://i50.photobucket.com/albums/f333/dcurrin1399/20170606_185646_zpsracc9f2w.jpg

If there's any consolation, it's that we're not the only ones. Many, many web sites are suffering...you'll probably find the same situation on many of the other forums you visit regularly.

There is no immediate fix for this situation. I cannot replace missing images because I didn't have them in the first place, and if the author of a thread is no longer an active member, that post will likely be image-less forever.

However, what I plan on doing is creating a self-contained image hosting feature for RLD members. It will allow members to upload photos and use them within RLD posts...but it WILL NOT support posting images on other sites - basically the same thing PhotoBucket is now doing. But I'm not doing it to hold anyone for ransom, I'm doing because I'm not interested in running an image hosting business and, frankly, my web hosting agreement doesn't allow me to do so.

I'll work as fast as possible to get this solution online so that future articles can have reliable images, and any active member can go back and re-upload images if they so desire.

As for the archive of content that goes back almost 10 years...I just don't know. This is almost a crossroads for the site in terms of content and focus. I'm debating and considering if RLD needs to adjust course a bit. It's been on my mind for a while and this unfortunate situation might be the best excuse. If you're interested, I can elaborate but I'll save that for later.

I'm going to focus efforts on coming up with an image hosting replacement and we'll go from there. 

For what it's, my apologies for the inconvenience and trouble PhotoBucket has caused. Overall, it's not so much that they chose to stop free hosting, it's that they didn't let anyone know so they could find a replacement. If we had had some lead time, we could have done a lot to save images and re-upload them.

I'll keep updating as things change and get online.