Making images permanent.
 

I run one particular artists site and we keep running into a recurring problem. Some of the users aren't real familiar with the whole vBulletin experience, and rather than uploading the images directly to our site, they are just linking their images from their own website or a pic storage site like photobucket.

Inevitably, they end up letting their website registration expire or their photobucket account goes stale, and a thread that may have consisted of 100 posts of ooh's and ahh's, or how to do this, or constructive criticism on the art, is rendered useless because the pictures are gone. Nine times out of ten the artist asks "what happened to my pictures?" I have to explain that they're gone because they were links to an external server that I have no control over. They cry and moan and think I'm a bad guy because their pictures are no longer on the site.

What I'm getting at here is an inquiry as to whether there is an existing plugin to take a link from an external site like a user's website or a third party hosting site, collect that image, and save it into our filesystem and change the code in the database to reference the local file rather than the external file so that it doesn't go dead. We have a policy on the site that if you want your content removed, ask and it will be removed without question. We're not trying to steal data. This is more about users *not* wanting content removed but the content is getting lost due to the user's using sketchy storage solutions rather than uploading directly to our site.

Any ideas?

<a href="https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=123338" target="_blank">Image Cache</a> originally produced for v3.5 does what you want. I have it running on v3.8.6PL1, but not sure about v4 though.