Hi fellow AFFers (doesn't quite roll off the tongue...)! I wrote up a blog post a week ago that explained the PhotoBucket situation where members using their image hosting service and have their images embedded on other websites are now being asked by PhotoBucket to upgrade their accounts to their $399/year plan (only their Plus 500 plan allows for 3rd party hosting). This affects a lot of our members who use their services and it also hits me personally since the person I started Asianfanfics with has all of her images hosted with PhotoBucket and I didn't want to lose them. I rushed for a week (since some PhotoBucket images were still accessible) to try to build an image backup service of our own and I managed to complete all story cover backups yesterday as well as the new story cover upload feature.

In short, you can now upload your images as your story covers either directly from your computer or use a URL like before and we'll back up the image for you! I also plan to expand this to profile avatars and later on, I'd like to give you the ability to have your own image accounts where you can upload the images you need for your own galleries, content, and designs. The only restriction we have for now is that there's a 5 MB limit to image uploads since I have to wait and see how well the servers can cope. It looks like out of 225,118 story cover images, only 132 are over 5 MB (a fair number of which are animated GIFs of dudes dancing) so I was fairly sure only a very small minority will get affected by that limit.

But first I wanted to get an idea of what you think so far since this is a brand new feature and we've never opened up to image uploads before since it comes with a few risks. If it turns out that no one's interested in the service then I'll move on to other features. Otherwise, if you're interested in us expanding our image upload and image backup services let me know in the comment section below. Have a good rest of the week!

P.S. I forgot to mention, all thumbnails for story covers have been recreated in higher quality at twice the resolution so they should have been looking better starting yesterday!