With respect you weren't the one dealing with the issues or fielding the complaints, and this was not just me. You've had people resign over Imagetwist. I was just the one who brought it to a head. I became pissed off when my browser was hacked for the third time. That is not "overstating" a problem. It's a real issue with real consequences.
When I tried to suggest to the Imagetwist rep that the problem was the host not checking ad code before embedding it the Imagetwist rep told me I was talking shit. You've just confirmed what I suspected and he denied.
In my book that makes him a liar.
As for the "38% reduction" talk to Yak. It's universally low quality social media crap and rips from bustybay.net from Ogar1 and mathushan. We're also not getting the multiple "bigger Bigger BIGGER" posts we used to get anymore. In short it's most of the stuff we ended up removing for being substandard garbage. High volume of posts yes, but so what if it all ends up being cleared because it is complete and utter shite? They posted all of that crap to generate money for themselves and no one is missing it. Least of all us since the workload of moving it all to the Cleaning thread has been eliminated. LiCeK's comments on this with regards other fora's increases are most revealing.
If all you care about is volume in the forum then simply remove all restrictions including the notion of "acceptable quality/subject" and "approved hosts". The place will be flooded and moderator workload will not be affected one jot.
BOC