For Games competitions the following rules must be followed.
  1. All images must be saved in the formats JPG, PNG or GIF. No other file formats such as BMP will be accepted.
  2. All image files must be under 100KB in size. All images larger than this will either be reduced in size by a staff member if they have time, or the member who submitted the image will be asked to remove the image or reduce the file size.
  3. All images must be 640x480 in dimension or smaller. Again any images larger than this in dimension will either be reduced in size by a staff member, or the member who submitted the image will be asked to remove the image or reduce the file size.
  4. All competition images must be hosted on the classicamiga members gallery. See below for details.
The classicamiga members gallery

All members have an account on the main site's members gallery. This is created automatically with every membership account on the main site. To access your members gallery just log into the main site and click on the Members Gallery link under the Users menu. The members gallery will then launch in its own browser window with you automatically logged in under your main site username.

With each new competition a new image album will be created inside of the Hiscore Competitions section of the gallery. Each member can then upload their hiscore images into this competition album for submission into the competition.

An example of this can be seen in the gallery for the POD competition.

Once the images have been uploaded into the classicamiga members gallery they can then be linked into the competition's forum thread by creating a new post and the entering the gallery image you wish to submit using an [IMG] tag or by clicking on the Insert Image icon.

To obtain the URL to link to an image in the members gallery, view the image in the gallery you wish to link to and click it to open the full sized image in its own pop up window. Finally right click on the image and view it's properties. Use the URL it shows under the image properties to link to it from the forum.

For example, one of the Pod Competition images in the gallery could be linked to by using the URL:
http://www.classicamiga.com/coppermi...63/POD_005.png

If you need this explained in more detail let me know and I can do a short screenshot guide.

Reason for this decision:

Until now members submitting images to the site for competitions would either attach the images to their posts or host the images on external image hosting sites such as paintbucket and then link to them in their posts.

Both of these methods are no longer accepted due to the following reasons.
  1. Images attached to posts on the site are saved into the site database. This increases the size of the database unnecessarily and slows down backup sessions.
  2. Images hosted on external image hosting sites do work fine in most cases, but this doesn't guarantee the images will still be hosted in the future. Future removal of these images will leave broken image links on the forum which is not desired.
  3. Images hosted on external image hosting sites also increases the chance of spyware and malware targetting the classicamiga server.