I recently saw that Imgur (the most popular image hosting website) has decided to block its service to the United Kingdom, following the British ICO's decision to threaten and ultimately proceed with fines over apparent violations of the UK's new Online Safety Act.
I'm not sure how Imgur was supposed to comply with the regulator's demands when Imgur is largely experienced by visitors of other websites that use the platform for image hosting. The service would cease to exist if every country took the same course of action.
In any case, the changes leave our site in a tricky position, as Pokemaster has never allowed image uploading and we've therefore been suggesting people to use Imgur instead since the early days of this community. We'll have to start using a different site to make sure no one misses out.
One of the benefits of Imgur is that it's battle-tested for allowing hotlinks, even on high-traffic webpages, even though that's expensive/frowned upon, even for years on end, and even though they could totally just delete high-traffic images or replace them with a logo (hello Photobucket). It's also free + anonymous if you prefer, which is neat.
I expect finding an equivalent will be hard. I'm going to test imgbb.com and postimages.org on a few of our high-traffic threads over the coming weeks/months to see how they cope. I'll update this post later if I settle on something good.
I've noticed some people using Discord, which is no good as Discord blocks hotlinks. Feel free to suggest other options that actively encourage hotlinking on forums and aren't sketchy. Obviously, the best solution is for Pokemaster to let us upload pictures, but the chances of that happening are 0%.
