Some good points there. In the early days of the forum, we opted for a simple "meat and potatoes" design. The content and the members were always the priority. We will be updating the site, and possibly looking into investing in some more storage space to enable more photos to be hosted here.
The advantages are as mentioned - hacked photobucket account etc. The only real disadvantage is that if the site had a technical issue and we had to revert to backups, it would not restore the pictures, as they are not backed up. The last backup of the site was a whopping 12 Gig.
But we are aware that the site needs upgrading, and useful threads like this help us plan for the future.
