This is a bit of a stretch, and a bit more of a long-term topic, but the thought just came to me.
MAngband has been around a while, as has this forum. Heck, many of you may not know this, but this spring, MAngband will be hitting it's ten year anniversary (woot!).
I suspect that mangband will be around for a while, and, by extension, this forum (or what it grows or transfers into) will persist for some time as well.
Over the handful of years, the web has started to see an odd and semi-unexpected problem: the interconnectedness of the web is starting to draw blanks. Even central, seemingly solid, places are going away, leaving what people thought was a safe long-term link suddenly dead. Content is disappearing.
For us, I would hate to see all the little bits of interesting screenshots, pictures, and whathaveyou, fade away when Imageshack or Tinypic go the way of the dodo.
What brought this to mind was a post I just made about something interesting I saw in the dungeon. I snapped a screenshot, cropped it up etc, and uploaded it to Tinypic to link to here.
At some point, one way or another, Tinypic is going to go away, and take it's content with it. It kind of makes me sad to think that some of the things we accumulate "here" arent really here at all - they will, link by link, image by image, fade away and leave little windows X's where a piece of content used to be.
This has some poignency for a place such as ours here that has been around nigh-on a decade, and quite possibly will be around for another decade to come.
A few other sites I use decided to try out hosting their own images - that is, users can upload images, within certain confines, to the site to host instead of some third party site. This means that as long as that place is around, it's accumulated content will be as well.
Now, this is one of those "easy to propose, difficult to implement" kinds of things - more space is needed and needs to be maintained, bandwidth usage suddenly shoots up, etc. However, and this is more focused on Crimson, I have a vague sense that the overall impact over time isn't too insane - even twenty-thousand 80k jpgs or gifs adds up to only a gig and a half of stored content. The resulting increase in bandwidth usage certainly is an issue, but my general sense from chatting with people is that it doesn't end up being completely stupid, and is instead within the realm of consideration.
So, pardon this kind of thought - the impending ten year birthday of mangband is bringing this kind of longer-term thought to mind - but is this something that could be considered? Just a thought.
-fink