**** You Too, Imgur! · 12:54pm Feb 7th, 2016
So, apparently, Imgur has blacklisted FimFiction. That means images hosted on Imgur will not appear on any pages on FimFiction's domain. Unfortunately, a lot of people use Imgur for image hosting, from random reaction gifs to custom horizontal rules for their stories. (Note that cover art for stories is already hosted on FimFiction, so they're all safe.)
I'm not left out of that group. I don't use quite as many images as some, but I do have images in some of my stories, and there are plenty of images I've posted in my blog that were hosted by Imgur.
A lot of comments on Xaquseg's site post are offering alternatives for image hosting, and Xaquseg says we may have some internal hosting in the future for things like images in stories. But after Image Shack (which was hosting a number of images in my blog and stories, before they shut down the ability of non-premium members to hotlink anything at all) and now Imgur screwing me out of images I'm trying to display here on FimFiction, I'm calling it quits on all of them. No more third-party image hosting for Lithl's images! Until FimFiction gets something native, I'm hosting my images myself.
I've had a Linode server for two years now (running Debian Linux, version regularly updated), and about a year ago I added a subdomain to it for serving static content. Specifically, it was to host some specialized fonts for a few Roll20 community character sheets, but now I'm expanding that subdomain to include any images I need to serve to FimFiction. In fact, I just recently got a free upgrade to my host account, adding a gig of ram (now 2G) and a terabyte of monthly data transfer (now 3T/mo). So anyway, long story short, I just uploaded 38 images (which is not, by the way, the sum total of the images that have been broken by Image Shack or Imgur, they're just the ones I care about) and went through stories, blog posts, and comments replacing Imgur links. Yey.
So, yeah. Screw you, Imgur! I'm gonna have my own image host! With blackjack! And hookers!
You know what? Forget the blackjack and hookers!
