I was in shock when they did it the first time. Thousands of pics blurred out or replaced with the black and white text of death! I considered bowing to their un-announced threat (they gave absolutely no warning in advance) and paying the fees, but what genuinely stopped me was that I now knew what they were capable of. Yes, their hosting was unstable, and very fiddly, behaving very badly on my computers, but I had grown used to all that. It was the fact that I now knew they could just remove link-ability to all your pictures at the drop of a hat.
Several things happened. First, I went to Imgur, so that from that point on my pics on W-E were hosted from there. Second I retrieved files of all my pics from photobucket to my own pc's and back ups, from which I then built my own Wordpress version of my campaign story thread, uploading and re-inserting every picture, whilst taking the chance to re-edit the text. Then the Oldhammer forum and the Vampire Counts Carpe Nocte forums used a program to lift, store and replace every one of the pictures automatically, thus repairing my campaign threads on their forums entirely. (The Oldhammer forum had and has the full thread. I started the thread later on Carpe Noctem.) I told the Warhammer Empire guys but they didn't do it for some reason (or no reason).
Now, if Imgur and/or the forums die, I have my Wordpress site as a back up. If the internet dies, we all have much bigger problems.
