Currently, old uploaded images and videos are removed. This can make it very difficult to understand and utilize old threads. As a developer, a lot of the forum’s value is in its collection of knowledge in answers and tutorials.
Automatically and indiscriminately (?) deleting images after about 4 years makes sense because it’s a waste to store some random person’s meme they posted half a decade ago, but this mass deleting also removes valuable resources.
For example, Egomoose made this tutorial 4 years ago:
This tutorial has forty-six thousand views and helped many people including myself over the years. But because the tutorial uses equations, which need to be represented as images, the educational value of the topic was basically ruined after the deleting:
The forums should have some change that results in preserving these topics, whether that is something that automatically saves images in topic posts and solutions with over X views*, downgrades images over time instead of removing them completely, or allows manual selection by designated people.
* Could be based on category too.
If this problem were to be addressed, the knowledge accumulated on the forums would be better preserved and more useful to people in the future.