In case you haven't noticed, taking a look at stickied Mods or Homemades threads on most NIC sites yields many pages of painful, dead image links, the largest cases residing in threads such as NerfHaven's Mod and Paintjobs thread, as it's been around since October 2005.
The biggest culprit here is image hosting services deleting images after users have deleted their accounts, or after simply hitting the image limits. Luckily, I've never had this issue as I never used the popular hosting sites, and instead used Servimg; While Servimg certainly has served me well, I'm here now to show you how to use
to host your images to ensure maximum functionality while also ensuring your image links will never die.
First off, this is Imgur; It's a quaint little site, initially created to serve as the main image host for Reddit, but it's now grown it's own community. Word of advice: while it may seem nice at first, avoiding using Imgur for anything other than image hosting is the wisest choice. The community is nice on the surface, but once you get dug in, you get to see how they really are, and it's not pleasant.
Anyway, on to learning to use Imgur. First, you're gonna want to click on the "Sign Up" button.
From here, go ahead and fill out your information, then hit "Sign Up" and a captcha should pop up to confirm your sentience status.
Now, you're back on the homepage, and you're ready to start using Imgur. The easiest way to upload is to drag images directly from your SD card or File Browser onto the page, which will prompt a pop-up.
Just hit "Start Upload" when you're ready. Note, in addition to uploading from your computer/SD card, you can also drag pictures directly from other websites, such as your current image host, to the Imgur page to upload them to your account. In fact, there's even an addon for Firefox(maybe Chrome too) that allows you to just right-click any image to instantly upload it to your Imgur account.
After the image has successfully uploaded, you'll be presented with this screen.
You want to be sure that "Original" is chosen at the bottom, and then copy the entire link in the box "Linked BBCode" to paste into your posts. I'm not sure about Foam Universe, but Home of Foam automatically formats my image links to a decent size, so this will allow you to use a reasonable size for the post, but people will be able to click the picture to view the full sized image for details. S**T's useful, yo.
And that's it, you can now fairly quickly generate image links for your posts that won't disappear, as far as I know, meaning I won't be browsing the Homemade thread in a year's time and be sad at the broken links.
I've never seen one disappear from a deleted account, and I even created a new account, uploaded a pic, then deleted the account, and the link still worked, so good for now. There is no longer a limit on the number of pictures you can upload, but there is a size limit of 10MB I think. This shouldn't be an issue as my 14megapixel pictures directly out of my camera are only 3.1MB, so there's quite a bit of leeway. In fact, the only issue I ever had was trying to upload a 106MB PNG of my PulseStrike design, but that picture was over 106megapixels, which was mainly just experimenting with my scanner.
The addon to allow right-click uploading can be found
.