Be a lot easier if this BBS hosted it's own pictures like every other BBS, instead of having to use a hosting service like Photobucket that may not be here next year, all that info lost...
Aw here we go again. There have been several photo hosting services besides Photobucket that failed or became defunct. The old Lefever Forum was hacked several years ago, and even the Site Administrators were unable to get in or access anything for weeks. I was able to find a backdoor that permitted them to at least be able to retrieve some of the information stored in the archives there. But they lost control of their forum, and the original site is now gone. I abandoned my efforts to help them further when the LACA started a new Forum to replace the one which became inaccessible. I just didn't find membership in LACA to be a good value anymore.
It couldn't be easier to post photos here. Upload, Copy, Paste, Submit. We see new guys who can figure it out, and even foreign members who can barely speak English are somehow able to post photos here. But there simply are no digital data storage mediums that are fail-safe. A good sized Carrington Event type solar flare or a well placed EMP could take out Google's or Apple's servers, so even Cloud Storage could fail. PC Hard drives fail. The newer SSD's are worse for long term data storage than the old HDD Drives that wear out mechanically. CD's, USB Drives, and DVD's all become corrupted or useless over time. Magnetic tape and VHS deteriorates. Playback and retrieval formats become obsolete. None of them have near the longevity of stone tablets or pencil writing on acid free paper. All anyone can do is try to back-up any files of photos or other information they wish to save. And then you will eventually have to back-up your back-up.
If Dave invested the time and money to host photos here, there would still be people complaining. And if anything happened to cause a loss of images being stored here, the same people would be blaming Dave for that too.
