Ending "Public" Photo Hosting

A while back I had a feature set up behind the scenes that allowed people to log in to a certain page on the site and upload images to be used on the message boards.

At first I invited a small handful of people to test it out and see how helpful it was. From there on, anyone who asked me about webhosting, I either hosted their photos for them, or I gave them access to this feature.

Over the past year, this folder has filled up a lot. Last month it pushed the site’s disk space beyond its quota, almost shutting the site down. My solution then was to delete anything in the hosting folder that was over 3 months old, only allowing more recent uploads. Even with that plan, our space is still teetering close to the allowed storage quota.

In addition, from going through that folder and bandwidth records, I noticed that some people that I offered this to had started to abuse it. I noticed that some photos were being linked to on other websites….draining our site’s bandwidth dramatically. I even saw some photos that were not aviation related at all (which I allow…as long as they were to be posted in the off-topic forum, which these photos were not).

Because of this, I will be deleting ALL of the contents of this folder over the coming days. Sorry to ruin it for everybody, but I feel I have no choice at this point. Anyone who has hosted anything, or had me host anything under the “nycaviation.com/hosting…” path will no longer be able to view those photos.

Many of you have avatars hosted on this space. I am willing to host ANYONE’S avatar, as long as it stay within the size constraints that I’ve set. If you need hosting for this, whether I have it hosted for you currently or not, can email me your avatar at [email protected], and it will be hosted in a new folder.

Also, keep in mind that this will leave gaps in many message board postings.

Eventually, I hope to implement something more controlled and open to the public. Until then, I urge you all to use PhotoBucket.com or the like. If you have questions or difficulty, please contact me also.

Thanks for your cooperation,

-Phil