[xyd]

I'm actually strongly considering developing a service for forum owners, as I am one myself, to do what this plugin did (or does, I don't know if it still works) along with a few extra features... all things I've been doing on my forum for a few years but utilizing custom code and not vB plugins...

There's almost nothing I hate more than coming to a forum and reading quality posts from a while back but the images not working in them.

What I've been doing, and the service that I'm considering starting up, would do these things:

1.) Any external images in the past that have been posted to your forum, which are still available, would be imported into my server cluster.

2.) After being imported, the image will be optimized (using lossless - or lossy - the site owner would be able to choose which they would want) using the latest image optimization routines (OptiPNG, etc etc etc).

3.) After being optimized, the old external images inserted into posts on your forums would be updated to no longer route to the external image, but the one on my server.

4.) Files would be distributed to your viewers over our CDN to allow for a better (by not having to wait for things to load) browsing experience.

5.) Any future posts made with external images inserted into them would have them automatically imported, optimized, posts updated and distributed through our service automatically.

The setup would be extremely painless, it'd pretty much be a set it and forget it type thing - everything would be done in the background.

I have a lot of resources at my disposal, but I'd charge around $10/month for access to this service (you can enable it for all of your forums - if you run multiple forums) because there are infrastructure costs if I were to provide this as a service.

Also you'd have the option to have all your normal image uploads (i.e. when someone attaches a jpg to a thread they are making) served through our service as well - the idea here would be to reduce strain on your server, reduce your bandwidth costs and improve browsing experience by faster page loading thanks to the files being served via CDN.

Another thing, and this is still experimental (but I'm implementing it on my forum as we speak), you would have the option to allow us to optimize your images even further, by making it so images that are way too big for the viewer's screen would be resized automatically during the import->optimization phase, into 4 different files (based on the most popular browser screen resolutions), which would not only increase their page loading speed, but decrease their bandwidth used and decrease your bandwidth used. They would, of course, be able to see the image in all it's glory by clicking on it, but the initial view would be sized intelligently (responsive web design). Images would never be upscaled - QUALITY and performance is something I require when it comes to processing images, so you would never see crappy quality images due to our service.

LASTLY, lol, this is still experimental as well (another thing I'm implementing on my forum as we speak), but images could be served as BPGs instead of JPGs/PNGs - more or less this would decrease the file size of images by about 30-40%, saving you and your viewers bandwidth, and making pages load even faster. Should this option be offered, and the forum owner want it enabled, you'd have to stick a piece of javascript into your forum (would all be done via the vB plugin) since BPGs aren't natively supported by browsers yet, but it's well worth doing. I'll post some before and after screenshots once I'm done implementing everything on my own forum.

As I said before, this would be an extremely powerful tool for any forum, there would be hardly any work required to implement it on your own forum. And of course since it would be provided as a service, I'd help anyone who needs it when it comes to installation/configuration.

I'm curious to see what kind of interest a service like this would conjure up - I know if it was around when I created my forum I would have definitely jumped on it for $10/month.