Yes, unfortunately what happened with Imageshack (and with other image sharing websites, though I guess Imageshack was the biggest one) was one of the sad parts of internet history. At some point they flat out decided to completely remove almost all old images that were shared there (unless they were from paid users), and since people usually don't make a backup for these things, the memories were just deleted forever I understand that it probably didn't earn them that much money, but still, I am pretty sure they could have handled it better - instead of deleting the images and replacing it with the "image not available" picture, maybe they could have just compressed the image (to lower the hosting costs) and perhaps slap some ad on it, with a notice that whoever wants, can get ad-free, full resolution version of the image for some fee. This way they could even make some money off of it and they wouldn't ruin a significant part of internet's history

But anyway, as for "taking up space" on the forum, I wouldn't worry about it, since the images are removed, I don't think these posts take any significant space. Also, it's worth checking via webarchive, sometimes it has even some images backed up (though it's rather rare).

I was simply disappointed. I wanted to see the pictures. If you look anything past 1 or 2 years is gone. So posts from 2022 and down are all blank.

Frustrating.

Maybe a sticky should be posted waning others so they do not waste a lot of time.

Hmm, I suppose I could make a sticky. But what should it say? That most topics have pics removed because image hosting websites decided to do so? Mind you, there are also some threads with vids. And I also saw old topic with screens still included, because the hosting website (idk what it was called, maybe photobucket?) decided to keep them up, just slap their logo on it and lower resolution (cheers to them, at least some good guys out there).