Given all the feedback about photo posting and despite my recent comments on the subject, I did some searching on the vBulletin support site on the subject and I found this post. It confirms some of my fears about photo hosting...that everyone has unspoken expectations about how slick and easy it will be, how they can upload an unlimited number of photos of unlimited filesize and resolution, and it will work just like FB or Instagram. But that won't be the case if I try to do it. I can't match the bandwidth and the storage space that these sites have. And if we were talking about 10 or 100 photos per person, that would be one thing, but we're talking hundreds or thousands for some of our most active members over the course of a few years. I mean, just one restoration post could have 30 photos of the steps involved.
I just don't see how I can pull it off successfully on vBulletin.
---
Fri 15th Feb '19, 5:07am
The main reason why we migrated from VB4 to VB5 last month was to provide forum users with an easier upload facility of their images. Previously, we suggested people use an external image hosting provider, but with the likes of Flikr and Photobucket making changes, this spurred on our decision making to go to VB5.
So despite giving them something they did not have, and making it easier, of course that comes with it's own problems.
We are a car forum, people like to show pictures of their car, shiny or mid-restoration. Typically people are not good at resizing images, and although we have 'unlimited' file storeage, we have set a 2MB limit per uploaded image. I do know that my hosts unlimited filesystem is not really unlimted !
I now am getting feedback that it's now too hard to upload an image, mainly due to the filesize the images are taken from Smart phones and Digital Cameras with ever increasing pixel count and file sizes.
Users are expecting a FaceBook type ability to upload their 15MB camera pic of their Mustang and the clever magic resizes it into the limit we have chosen. I have done a quick search and cannot find any solution through configuration or modification that can do this in VB5.
--
If we move to another platform like Xenforo, it may be worth taking another look. For now, I don't see it happening while on vBulletin.
But if there's a consensus on a subforum or some scheme for organizing content better, those things are doable.
Bill mentioned a wiki...haven't heard that term in ages...there is a Wiki plug-in for vBulletin called VaultWiki, but I have tried to stay away from plug-ins in order to run a clean, easy to support vBulletin environment, and that really paid off in spades when going through our recent forum meltdown...plug-ins played no part in troubleshooting, PHP versioning, etc.