But if everyone uses an external image host, wouldn't it also make anonymous users to see the images posted that way? Maybe I didn't explain my question sufficiently well, as it can be rather counter-intuitive. In fact, the change I'd like to see made is
not requiring membership to view images, because the current system prevents the CDN to cache protected images, thus limiting the effectiveness of using such a system.
As I understand it, there are two benefits of requiring login to view full-sized images. First off, it may prevent outsiders from realizing how perverted we are
And also, it may prevent those fellow perverts who haven't joined the site yet for whatever reason from leeching those images (potentially with a crawler program) so they exhaust the traffic quota and cost us more money.
As such, if we are encouraging people to use an external host to post images, it means that we don't really care about the first of those problems. (I'm ok with it myself, for the record. Everyone knows I'm perverted anyway.)
As for the second problem, it would cause trouble in a normal situation. But now we have a
free CDN working as a proxy, we don't have to care how many users request those images. What we need to care is how much of those requests actually reach the origin, that is the server that runs CF.
Currently, 100% of those request reach the server since CF does not cache protected images (reports "
CF-Cache-Status: DYNAMIC"). We
may be able to change that so that only a small fraction of them reach the server and add to the traffic quota, if we lift the login requirement and expose them for anonymous access.
That is why I like to ask the opinion of our moderators and members, and the site owner about the matter.
P.S. After writing this, I realized there could be the third reason why we may want to keep the requirement, which could be motivating more people to join the site. However, I suppose it would becomes a moot point like the first problem, once we encourage our members to use an external image host because images posted that way would be accessible without a login.