For anyone unaware, a few months ago, the UK passed the Online Safety Act which means any online services that host any mature content must add age verification. This involves uploading a photo of yourself or some form of identification for a third-party service to approve, but a lot of people (myself included) are against this as they don't want their personal information being handled by potentially questionable companies — plus, there's the whole issue of data breaches that happen so often these days.
Many sites have been forced to add age verification, including the types of sites you're probably thinking of, plus more innocent ones like Reddit and Spotify.
Sadly, some sites don't see it economically feasible to implement age verification so they've blocked UK traffic outright. One of those sites being Imgur, which I rely on to host all my images.
As a result, all the images on my blog and my Inspiration Database (around 2,000 images in total) are now offline to UK readers.
Replacing each image will take me forever and I actually don't have many of them saved outside of Imgur, so I wouldn't be able to do it anyway. Sadly, the only option is to leave them offline for UK readers.
I've figured out a way of saving them but I'll have to save and re-upload each one individually, so it's going to take me a while.
If anyone in the UK would like to see them, I recommend using a VPN. I currently use Mullvad, which I highly recommend, but you have to pay a small fee to use it. I know some web browsers, like Opera, have a built-in VPN, which could be an option if you want something free.
I'll find an alternative image host that won't be subject to the OSA for my future posts. Hopefully, one day, the OSA will be repealed but since it's supported by the two main parties, I don't see it happening any time soon.
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