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.

does your host do regular backups?? id say they would do it at least every 24 hours and that should include every bit of data including pictures. our host used to do them every 6 hours. we had our site hacked many many times, and we used to have to resort to host data, it was almost impossible for us to do our own backups as you stated 12gig is allot. we could have paid for an hourly backup service. but 6 hours of data loss was annoying but not a killer. you should ask what their server backups are, if its like 12 hours that would be exceptable imo, just remember you should be able to contact your server and ask them to resort to the latest backup if your site gets hacked and destroyed.

also dont get to carried away with updates, due to me being in direct comp with another forum, we would spend every bit of resource available outdoing each other, lol paying for the best forum software going crazy with the most hardcore design and forum add-ons as they were released.

this forum works fine and its simple so i wouldn't go too hardcore with updates. and if you are talking about going vbulletin you need to know if you don't do it right it is a pain for the users, but when done right its awesome.
It is a $120us a year for it. vs smf being free. and smf does the job. and so it depends on budget, it can be either an investment depending on forum size or waste of funds. it is bloody fantastic software and the add-ons for it are very useful.

I really am not going to bag out aa, so im not taking sides here, but i will talk about their use of vBulletin software and the only reason I joined this forum over them when i was surfing around looking for a pinball forum. was that they have not settup vbulletin correctly and the software is done very wrong and making it hard to use. i dont know anything about the history of the two forums so im just saying knowing vbulletin very well, that was the only reason for my initial choice of forum.
a poorly setup paid software vs a good setup? well the good settup software wins every time, no matter how simple it is. being simple format works here.