CharlotteTheHarlot wrote:...Are you saying it is better to re-upload them ( attachment ) rather than link from Imgur or Photobucket or Flickr? Just curious as to why that is better...
External links tend to "die" as time goes by. Imagine 10 years from now, maybe those external image services will not be there. By uploading them directly into your post in here, you "seal" them as a packages in here. Everything in "one place". As an example, take that Windows 8 - Deeper Impressions thread on MSFN. Many pictures in there are "dead" links.
Our vision is that if we someday are forced to shut this Web site down, we don't want any of the data to be lost. We can then zip the entire database and make it available to others if they wish to have a copy of this place or perhaps in the future we can try to build a native function for saving threads. Having local copies of the files on our servers attached to our database makes such things possible.
Another reason is privacy and security, many times these services can go "bad", for example they can use cookies or javascript to track users even when viewing a picture (many of them already do). By serving everything directly from this Web site, our users will not need to worry about third party cookies and scripts. They can rest assured that when viewing foolsdesign.org, no other third party is involved.
...and of course, generally speaking, relying on third parties to hold your data is a bad idea.
