alright, after ALL THIS TIME why is it Free Republic does nothave an upload place for photos?
If we post it as a link to an external site we risk it moved or changed.
Open a free photobucket account or some other site and store a copy of the picture there.
Those work fine for small forums, but they can get real bandwidth heavy. I helped administer a consumer review site that had similar hits into the tens of millions and we trialed something similar and it almost brought the site down. If this was like a newspaper website where there are one or two contributors, but millions of hits, it could be fine. If it where a forum with a bunch of contributors but few hits, it would be fine, but with tens of thousands of posters and millions of hits, it can really drag a site down.
Even Blogger has problems at times and that has the power of Google's data farms behind it.
I'm sure Jim could do this if he wanted, but the expense for bandwidth and server space would probably triple. Its all a balancing game...
BTW, I have no inside baseball knowledge, this is just a guess as to why..
A. People would be able to load copyrighted material to FR
B. And viruses
C. It takes up space.