IMGUR is taking it to the next level when it comes to removing inactive images. It turns out that the community of Rust was once again a victim of images being removed and considered inactive. This however is due to the new policy of Imgur. While I’m writing about this, it already has been resolved on our Rust server, but, this was not the first time when they deleted images.
The reason for these actions from Imgur is due to hotlinking. They limit hotlinking big time and they remove any images that are long overdue or inactive. To bypass such an event, we would have to visit the images on a weekly base at least once in order to keep it on Imgur. Thus, even if your images are not against the policy of Imgur of course linking images with spicy content or content that does not belong on the web gets removed and your account would be suspended.
For us, we thought it would be a great idea to host the images on our discord. Sadly, even Discord is now taking steps to disable hotlinking completely. Something they should have been doing for a long time as Discord is nowadays also used by hackers and scammers who would like to take a piece of you.
Nowadays, we use Dropbox for our images. Even though, it seems that even Dropbox might now also taking steps to ensure that links expire. We would need to move our content yet again, where we don’t know. Who knows we would look into a Google Drive option or something.
