Image uploads now enabled

A couple months ago, Imgur, the most popular anonymous image upload service, announced that all anonymously posted images would be deleted, and all uploads going forward would require an account. As many of you know, thousands of images posted on these forums were hosted on Imgur anonymously. It has been the standard for posting images for years. Hearing that news had us concerned, not that losing all of those images in the forum was a dire situation, but that it would leave many of the threads that show progress of mods from the last decade completely useless.

All Imgur images previously posted are now locally hosted
Thanks to @AshuraDX going above and beyond, he did his database voodoo and retrieved every single Imgur link on the forum, including tutorials and news articles, and re-hosted them on our server, keeping the original file names in tact. For example if you posted a link like this:

https://i.imgur.com/n9YsBml.jpg

It is now this:

https://jkhub.org/images/n9YsBml.jpg

We also came up with a quick solution for albums. A simple page showing the images, while keeping the individual links in tact.

https://jkhub.org/albums/VRFiDx2

Keep in mind, they didn't give much of an advanced warning before they began deleting anonymous images, so there may be a small number out there that weren't saved.

Also, this is mostly a one time thing that we will do. We may look again in the future, but going forward, we recommend not using Imgur at all to host your images here, or really anywhere even if you have an account. They have shown they are not profitable enough to be sustainable, so it is most likely a matter of time before they go full paid subscription to host images, like ImageShack or Photobucket did.

So how do I post images then?
Local image hosting is now enabled for all users. You should now see an option to drag and drop or choose an image to upload at the bottom of your text box as shown below. We have a generous max upload size in place for now, but ask to not abuse that. Most images shared are an average of 1MB. If yours is a lot bigger than that, run it through ImageOptim or something if you want.

Why didn't you allow image uploads in the forum before?
In short, server storage is expensive. We tried to keep the size of JKHub as small as possible. We host all mod files in a separate CDN which keeps costs lower, and we could in theory do the same for locally hosted images, but our CDN service is not supported natively by the forum software. When forum activity was booming, it made the most sense. Now that activity is much lower these days, having it enabled should be okay.

What about the Files section images?
We already host all images in the Files section, and we have gone out of our way to save and manually upload any images submitted via Imgur or other hosts, to avoid this very problem from ever happening. Though, it was always more likely for the author to delete the images before an entire service was shut down, after seeing what happened to ImageShack and Photobucket, we didn't want to risk a key part of hosting mods to ever get lost, and now we were proven to be right about that. So those have always been hosted locally on our server since day one.

Bot attacks
In other news, we got hit with a significant bot attack a couple weeks ago. If you had email notifications for forums on, your inbox probably shed a tear. We have upped registration security a bit, and have set all new account posts to be manually approved by staff. 100% of the bot posts were new accounts that posted instantly. We can at the very least save you guys from seeing them when they happen now.

We appreciate you
That's all for now, though we do have some things planned for later this year and beyond that you'll hear about when it is time. Thanks for sticking with us, and remember we provide all of this for free and ad-free for you. Money is tight for a lot of people right now, including us, but if you do have the ability to donate even a small amount to help keep us around, it is greatly appreciated.

UPDATE 2024-Mar-29
Discord has started blocking externally linked images now too. Please avoid using Discord image links. Just upload directly like explained above.