Hi CS12,
For a long time, we have primarily disallowed local uploading of images due to the costs associated with hosting images ourselves. However, with the recent revelation that Photobucket has decided to charge EACH USER an exorbitant fee of 399.00 a year to allow any non-photobucket website to display the images, we have revised our policy.
Going forward, all images should be uploaded locally. If you must link to an external image host, please only do so for situations that don't need to withstand the test of time. Lounge photos can still be externally hosted. If posting in any of the technical forums or build forums, please try to upload your images instead of using an external host. This will allow us to continue to host your images for years to come regardless of changes to the external image host's terms of use.
This does mean, however, that any image uploaded to our site will be licensed under the Creative Commons License (same as used on Wikipedia for images uploaded there).
Also of note, I am working on finding a way to retrieve the broken images that are linked all throughout our forum. Once I am able to get these downloaded, we will be uploading them to our site to host them. If you have concerns over the downloading of and rehosting of your images, please let me know. We would be happy to help you through the process of upgrading your Photobucket account and/or rehosting the images somewhere else that you have access to.
Thanks!
The Management.