Effective immediately, the only acceptable image host for IGT proof is "Proof", our community-managed image host.

Effective immediately, the only acceptable image host for IGT proof is "Proof", our community-managed image host. We made this decision mainly because of the ephemeral nature of image hosting: we can't be sure, in six months, a year, five years, that the proof you submitted of your completed run will still be publicly available. Policy changes dictated from the top down by for-profit enterprises have hit this part of our community hard over the past year. See these examples:

• May 2023: Imgur is Deleting All Old Content Not Tied to an Account
• July 2023: Twitter now requires users to sign in to view tweets
• November 2023: Discord will switch to temporary file links to block malware delivery

As the examples above illustrate, relying on services we don't control for our image hosting is a fool's errand. Bandwidth is an extremely expensive part of serving content, and for-profit companies are looking to cut costs wherever they can and avoiding link rot is rarely on their priority list. To be honest, we're kind of tired of having to do this dance every time a decision like this gets made. So we're moving this part of our speedgame to a place we can control with the goal of better preserving the body of runs and the history of the Metroid Dread speedgame. We are also taking similar actions to preserve the body of video proof as well; we'll go into more detail on that when we have something actionable.

Going forward, use of any external image host (including Discord, public social media, or cloud-based storage services that allow hotlinking from external sites, such as OneDrive or Google Drive) will result in your run being rejected. Use only the service below to host your proof.

https://proof.hijumpboots.com

If you have any issues with the above service for any reason, you can:

• make a post in the forums
• make a post in the "community-suggestions" forum in the Metroid Dread Speedrunning Discord server.
• send an email to hijumpboots [AT] gmail [DOT] com

and we'll take a look as soon as we can. Thanks, and take care.

jay