if you hung out on lego fan forums circa 2001, you wanted to show people 640x480 digicam photos of your constructions. To do this, you needed a server that would host images, which didn't exist. Someone, presumably some form of Dad, decided to solve this problem altruistically and created Brickshelf
Brickshelf predated Photobucket and most other ""free"" image hosts by several years, and it was insanely reliable. Whoever runs it was clearly spending a ton of money to keep it up, just out of pure love for lego robots
The catch was (presumably still is): Everything you upload is manually moderated and they'll delete anything that isn't related to legos
HOWEVER: there was a workaround. Bionicle lore is Fucking Impenetrable, and the bionicle fan forum was populated by tens of thousands of 11-year-olds, so a huge portion of brickshelf uploads were incomprehensible mspaint bionicle memes. It was nearly impossible for a brickshelf moderator to actually discern whether any given image was Lego-Related or not, because like, we were over there making lined-notebook pencil drawings of regular human dudes with swords and being like "this is tahu, from bionicle, but like as a guy instead of a robot"
so the moderators just kinda let anything through if it looked sufficiently bionicle-y
THIS LED TO A REVELATION:
I realized I could use Brickshelf to host ANY images, as long I mspainted a bionicle mask into the image somewhere. fuck photobucket. I used this technique for like five years
