Third-Party Image Hosting

Access Norton now blocks links and images from selected third-party hosting providers.

The reason is simple: unreliable third-party hosting has caused a major long-term problem across the forum.

Over many years, members posted valuable photographs and links using outside hosting services. When those services changed, deleted files, blocked hotlinking, expired accounts, moved content, or disappeared entirely, parts of otherwise valuable Access Norton discussions stopped working.

In many cases, the original photograph is not simply removed.
A third-party host may replace it with an ugly generic placeholder, error graphic, advertising image, or unrelated content that has no relevance to the original discussion.

We are now having to go back through thousands of old posts to identify missing images, remove broken copies from quoted posts, replace dead images with appropriate notices, and import working images back onto Access Norton so they can be preserved properly.

It has been a large and time-consuming cleanup, and we do not want to recreate the same problem in the future.

Why some providers are blocked

If content is hosted somewhere else, Access Norton has no control over whether that content will still exist next month, next year, or ten years from now.

A third-party provider may:

• Delete an image or page
• Change its URLs
• Block external display
• Replace an original photograph with an ugly or irrelevant placeholder
• Display an error or advertising graphic instead
• Close an account
• Change or restrict its service
• Disappear completely

When that happens, an otherwise useful technical discussion can lose the photograph or reference that made the post understandable — or worse, display something completely unrelated in its place.

For that reason, providers that have caused reliability problems may be added to our Provider Block List.

What happens if a provider is blocked

If you try to post a link or image from a provider that Access Norton has placed on its blocked-provider list, the post will not be saved until that blocked URL is removed or replaced.

The warning will identify the provider that caused the problem so you know exactly what needs to be changed.

For images, please upload the photograph directly to Access Norton whenever possible. For other links, please use another reliable source.

Why direct image uploads are better

Images uploaded directly to Access Norton stay connected to the post they belong to and can be managed and preserved with the rest of the forum content.

That gives us a much better chance of keeping valuable photographs available for future owners, restorers, and researchers.

What we are doing with older images

We are actively cleaning up historical third-party images already posted on the forum.

Where an external image still works, we may import and preserve it on Access Norton.

Where an image is permanently gone, or has been replaced by an irrelevant third-party placeholder, we may replace it with a small Access Norton notice while preserving the surrounding discussion.

This cleanup has made it very clear how much damage unreliable third-party hosting can cause over time.

Blocking selected providers is intended to stop that problem from continuing.

Thank you for helping us preserve the Access Norton archive.