Imgur Cracking Down On Hotlinking

Very recently, imgur decided to crack down on their TOS and basically block anyone who uses imgur-hosted images on other sites--forums especially.  Right now they're apparently targeting Jcink forums pretty hard, and while I haven't heard of any issues with Proboards yet, everyone seems to agree that it's pretty likely to bleed over.

So!  I would suggest migrating any imgur-hosted pictures you have to an alternative image host, just in case they do start blocking Proboards sites as well.  A couple of alternatives I've seen are:

use.com - I've actually used this one before, and it's decent.  You can create albums, but they a) have a limit of 100 pictures iirc, and b) you can't add to already-existing albums.

UltraIMG - Haven't used it, but seems to have the same features that imgur does.  Also allows hotlinking.  It's completely free from what I can tell, and has no storage limits.  Max file size is 10MB, I believe.

postimage.org and imgsafe are other ones I've heard of, but I haven't checked 'em out.  And, as always, there's Photobucket too.

Anyway, just thought I'd let everyone know in case the word hasn't spread.  Better to be safe than sorry, yeah?  I'll try and keep up with the situation as it develops, but if anyone gets the news before I do, please add on to this.

From what I can tell, the main gist of it all us that they don't want imgur to be used as a CDN. It's not like they've suddenly gone mad. The TOS actually does state forum avatars specifically.

I'm keeping my sketch album on imgur; I'm not really hotlinking my sketches a lot.

In any case, postimage.org is specifically for forums, I'll check that out first.

Yeah, I get where they're coming from--hotlinking demands a lot of resources from them, and as you said, it does go against their TOS. It's just a shame that they've got such nice features for image-hosting, haha--makes some of the alternatives pale considerably in comparison.

Personally, I've found Ultra IMG to be great--it has most of what imgur had, though you can't rearrange albums (goodbye, alphabetized icon folders). I was checking out Post Image, but they require you to include a link when embedding images, which turned me off of it immediately.