I'm doing something wrong I guess.
A cautionary note for people using Halie.com: It has become geofenced in some areas due to abuse, which means a number of photos here have "disappeared." Over time, as more people (outside of VAF) find Halie.com, abuse will likely spread to other areas that will end up geofenced as well. I understand the photos are still there, but my area can no longer access halie.com so I can't see them anymore... It used to work just fine.
For maintaining long term value for the maximum number of users here on VAF, users may want to start looking for another solution now rather than later.
Best solution: Doug should upgrade to the latest version of vbulletin, and start hosting images for all users. That would solve this problem. If the cost is really high to store images, make that a feature that we would have to pay for. I'd rather pay extra money to Doug to store images than to a 3rd party.
2nd best solution: Pay someone like bluehost to give you a wordpress site, and then you have a blog, and a place to store images. A bit more work, but gives you more features than just an image hosting service. You can also go to wordpress.com and get a free site - not sure how many images you get there, but you also get a blog.
3rd best for nerds: get a server somewhere in the cloud or in your basement if you get a static IP and host them there, but get ready to waste a lot of time managing it!
So here we go again? Halie promising to host our images indefinitely and then having to take measures that disrupt their availability. Don't take that the wrong way. I applaud Halie's benevolence in providing this for us. But perhaps it truly is too good to be true. The very fact that halie is a side show pet project may portend poor support and weak security.
Oddly enough, it works from my office in Victoria, but not my house in Sidney. Both in BC, Canada. I guess the geofencing isn't perfect...Due to an unbelievable amount of the worst kind of abuse, it's now available only in the US.
I guess geofencing isn't perfect...
I REALLY wish this site would be upgraded to the latest version of vBulletin. This version is over a decade old. The newer versions handle photos WAY better.
[ed. http://www.vansairforce.net/articles/ImagesInForums/images.htm for why I don't host photos. If anyone would like to start their own photo hosting site, please do!!! I certainly don't want to. The space requirements and complexity of image/video/360 panos/VR/podcasts/etc is growing exponentially - I don't need that burden to add to my current workload. Again, if you would like to take on the task, I'm your biggest fan!!! As this thread demonstrates, image hosting can be a challenge. Upgrading vBulletin won't change that.
Please give the link a read - the problems and scales are more difficult than you might imagine. There is nothing simple about it. v/r,dr]
While on the subject...a test, please.
If you can't see the photos in this thread, let me know:
http://www.vansairforce.com/community/showthread.php?t=22931
If someone is dying to see the photos restored in a particular thread, just send an email.
I think i've posted this before in other photo threads, but for anyone who hasn't seen it, this image resizer has to be the easiest way for a user to resize before uploading: https://www.bricelam.net/ImageResizer/Folks should learn how to use a photo editor and simply reduce images to no more than 800 pixels wide for VAF so they don't cause annoying page overflows.
I think i've posted this before in other photo threads, but for anyone who hasn't seen it, this image resizer has to be the easiest way for a user to resize before uploading: https://www.bricelam.net/ImageResizer/
That said, resizing is something that can be done trivially on the server where the images are hosted... It could happen at time of upload, anything that comes in gets resized to 800 or 1000 pixels wide and no more than 100kB each.
This version we are on was released over a decade ago, which is a millennia ago in software. I don't even think vBulletin is still offering support and/or patches for vulnerabilities for it.
Anyone want to take bets whether Doug might be more inclined to spend money on things like software upgrades, if a bit more than the small percentage of users that actually do, contributed each year?
I've been contributing for quite a while now, yearly.