[srett]

> Which, of course, leaves a trail of forum posts, comments, etc, with broken images and links.

I remember this from long long ago, when I was a student and helped running a vBulletin on the side for fun. When I noticed this trend while browsing older posts that had the a lot of imageshack embeds (they apparently deleted old files which weren't accessed that often, also the url format might have changed once) I cobbled together a plugin that would save all posted images locally and then serve those instead. This lead to some protest however by people who had those fancy dynamic images in their signature that would show the currently playing song or similar, so those had to be excluded...