Quote:
Originally Posted by PeteVS
Forgive me for not having read all the texts but my take is that the software that's used for this forum is ancient and it goes back to the the days when memory was expensive. If one has a ton of large format images, it takes a lot of money to store that data on a site that can be accessed by the public. As members of the forum, we're allowed a certain amount of data storage. If you want to post large pictures, you don't download the image, you download the ADDRESS of where your image lies. Over the years, there have been some wonderful threads with beautiful large images and in some cases, the poster of those images for one reason or another has abandoned those imagesly (possibly by not making payments for their storage) and the forum then will only show the address for the images USED TO BE. Pete, God bless him, has been keeping those big beautiful images out there for us all to enjoy. If for some reason he decides to no longer participate, we'll all be left hanging. Enjoy them while we can.
|
I think your confusing the actual forums with "Photo Hosting" outfits like
PhotoBucket. They're the ones that charged to store your pictures and causes them to disappear if you don't pay the bill. Back in the day, the problem was bandwidth more so than data storage. When most forum access was over "dial-up" lines, it could take literally minutes to download a large image; that's why they came up with "thumbnails". They loaded relatively quickly and if you found them of interest, you could "click" on them and get the large image, even though it took a while. With the coming of internet access, bandwidth concerns evaporated as the speed difference is so great.
The problem is the software, not hardware. The
vBulletin package that "The Ford Barn" runs on is absolutely ancient, designed back in the day of limited disk storage and dial-up access. As such it has many built in limitations. Ryan's other form, the "H.A.M.B." converted to a more modern platform several years ago, and over there, they encourage you to post all photos full size. I believe plans were to upgrade the "Ford Barn" software as well, but feedback from the users caused that idea to die on the vine.
It's really a matter of personal choice. I find the redundant images annoying, because if they were of interest to me, I would have already enlarged them which makes them redundant and a waste of my time. Others disagree, which is their right. Even I would disagree with the forum banning such activity, so I guess it's our cross to bear.