A preferred approach to image hosting on PokeBase

Question

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 through 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 seen 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%.

Comments

What if I don't want Br*tish people to see my images?

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postimages.org looks way better just on the principle of the first thing you see isn't so overtly "buy our subscription!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" but i dont think there's a right/wrong answer here as long as it's not something that will delete images without warning.

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It's always been present but Imgur often promotes suggestive or inflammatory content that's been posted publicly and I've been thinking that that might not be the healthiest place to refer a young userbase. That UI may also be confusing for someone trying to learn to upload images for the first time only to come across a distracting social media-like platform.
I like postimages.org, but can't speak to how it holds up under high traffic.

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Yeah good point. I'll link the upload page instead for now.

Answer 1

After a couple weeks of testing, it seems like imgbb.com and postimages.org have both tolerated the abuse. I think that's enough time to make postimages.org the official unofficial image host for PokeBase!

The service seems to have all features and performance benefits of Imgur, and I've already seen other people using it in their posts. The only lingering concern is that Imgur, being a corporation, is more likely to stay online and avoid causing link rot -- though PostImages clearly has some staying power as well.

I've updated the image posting guide to recommend PostImages and have tried to make that guide easier to find.

If you see any posts using Imgur, PLEASE FLAG THEM so we can move the pictures to PostImages. Help from all experts+ would be greatly appreciated for replacing the pictures.

Comments

Have you tested its ability to have whole galleries of images? It's been a while since I've seen one but there have been a couple questions years in the past where several images in one link is optimal. I think there was one about the original Ken Sugomori watercolors, for example.

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It's not as good as Imgur's galleries, but it does have the feature: https://postimg.cc/gallery/81kWY2t