I don't want to host mega pixel images of 1 or 2 or 3 megs in size. Easy for ImageMagick to optimize the images from camera size to an efficient displayable size. A hundred thousand 200k images is much more reasonably managed than a hundred thousand 2.5 meg images.
It sounds like what you need is a photo gallery software, rather than (or in addition to) a discussion forum software.
One of my larger sites has over 16,000 photos linked to its UBB.threads install using Gallery2.
And I believe its current UBB.threads attached files (mostly images) is over roughly 51,000.
Gallery v2.3.2 @
http://galleryproject.org/Facebook is killing my forum with their ease of uploading 2 + meg camera images and ending up with optimized < 200k images on their server. Lost a lot of users in this past year because UBB isn't keeping up with current image handling standards.
I do not believe that you are losing members to facebook purely because of their ability to host images. Does facebook.com even allow you to hotlink (inline) full sized images to another website?
There are many alternatives:
http://imgur.com/http://tinypic.com/http://photobucket.comhttps://imageshack.usAlong with Flicker and Pintrest.
The problem with a dwindling user base that you're seeing may be more related to the changing of times, and less of "Site-X has a single better feature than my Site-Y." Because, if the Site X/Y thing was true, you probably would totally dominate with all the many /more/ features you can provide to your users, than the other guys are currently providing.
"Steve C" did a good commentary about this a while ago -
There is definitely another trend going on here as well.
My forum -- [...] -- traffic has dwindled drastically in the past several years. I attribute it to Facebook. A number of "groups" have cropped up on FB that target the same people as my forum, and I even see many of the most active people (who have all but left the UBB forum) posting in the FB groups.
There is some sort of social need for people like that to post to an audience, and if there is only a small audience in a particular forum, they move to one with more participation. It really stinks that the FB setup/genre supports more of a "chat room" feel, where comments pretty much evaporate after a day or two.
The true forums, on the other hand, provide historic data which can be searched and referenced in later posts. That feature is really important to me. FB to me is such a hollow, shallow, empty tool for sharing real information, but for the masses, it appears to be their choice spot.
And that just stinks!
