This is not the time at all to let these threads go.
I know you’ve already said “problem solved” but I still felt the need to comment.
These aren’t just “Here’s a light that I put a new led and driver in” mods but Frankenstein meets Michelangelo mods that aren’t so much about the led and driver(although there’s plenty of that) but alterations, additions, and recombinations of different parts for the host too. You could spend weeks reading through the list of his build threads and he’s not alone, plenty of others have done remarkable work and posted build threads with unique and valuable insights and ideas. It would be a shame to lose them. If you enjoy trying your hand at it they’re a wonderful resource and even if you don’t they’re still entertaining.
There is much more banners on this forum than 99% of forums i know of (like i said the one i owned had only one banner, less traffic than BLF and made 1500€ + each month), obviously this site is SB’s property and he is entitled to do whatever he wants with the money he makes of it, but i don’t understand members who are clueless about this kind of business trying to maintain the myth that only way for this site to afford a decent server and host pics is for it to become paying membership, BLF could afford to rent a ridiculously overkill server in bandwith, computing power and storage space with much less than 10% of it’s earnings.
Okay, I won’t dispute that, since I have no idea what BLF earns or how much server bandwidth costs. So, why doesn’t he buy the extra bandwidth and storage space, and allow pictures to be hosted on BLF? That would make it far easier for people to add photos to posts, and you never have to worry about them going away.
Frankly, I’ve never really understood why some sites don’t allow hosting of pictures. There are ways to restrict their size in-line so they don’t chew up too much bandwidth (for both the server and end-user).
CPF doesn’t allow hosting pictures either, and given the amount of money it must generate, I’m confused.
On my forum i restricted to one banner and rented a server that could have hosted 30 forums with their pics, files and whatever to make the experience of the members the best i could, because i always felt like a douche to cash in on a content that was 100% members created, the framework of the forum was worthless without the members that filled it and attracted traffic doing so, my work to maintain the forum and implement the fonctions users suggested took me probably less than 2 hours/week.
Cultural differences acount for the differences in outlook on this matter, what is considered greedy in one part of the world is perfectly ok in another, SB is obviously a top guy and i’m not attacking him, our 100% culturally constructed values are different, that’s all, no judgment.