There are several issues in this thread, and I think I experienced them when I owned a photography forum. Server space for user content can be expensive, and when I owned the photography forum, I didn't allow members to post images directly. Since all of the members were photographers, with huge image files, I would have run out of space in a few weeks with the basic plan I had (about $240 per month for a leased dedicated server and six static IP addresses).
Instead, members use their own image hosting sites, the minority was Photobucket, and linked images using the IMG tag built into BBCode. This solved two problems: server expansion and copyright issues. Since the images were not hosted on my server, members who decided to take their toys and go elsewhere could change the links on their image hosting site and the images in the threads were like Photobucket is now...broken.
The other major issue in this thread is the ownership. If anything happens to the owner, then the future of UKW could be in jeopardy. Again, in my case, I inherited the photography forum after the remaining original owner lost interest over time. His original partner in the forum died years earlier and had been the main administrator. I started out as a member, then became a moderator, and very shortly after that became one of two Super Administrators who had complete control over the server and database. For the next couple of years I effectively maintained the server, database, saving the daily backups offsite, and had been paying about 75-percent of the annual operating costs. The original server and OS had reached their end of life and it was starting to show. I had to reboot the server at least once a week, rebuild and reindex the database every month, and security patches were no longer available for the version of vBulletin we were using. It was a sinking ship and catastrophic failure was only a matter of time.
As soon as I became the owner, I began the process to lease a new server from the same host and transition from vBulletin to XenForo. By December of the year I became the owner, the transition was complete and the website was stable. The move to the new server and forum software was done overnight, but only after two months of testing on the test server. After several more years, my interests in photography changed and I handed the baton to a new owner earlier this year.
In my case, transfer of ownership to me, and recently to the current owner, was smooth and pleasant. Had the original owner not cared or gone to his great reward, the website would have vanished at the first failure because I would not have been able to do anything with the domain name. I empathize with the UKW Moderators, because I truly know what is involved in moderating a discussion forum. I hope that some have full admin privileges to plug the holes, turn on the bilge pumps, and make adjustments as required. If not, then the future of UKW is one failure away.
I was (am) a member of another website specializing in Whitefriars glass. Sadly, this website is gone because someone with access to the hosting site cancelled the hosting without telling the current administrator or owner. Everything was lost, but the owner found some old backups and might be able to restore some content.
