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The site runs on no database
Well... you have a database, it's just one that you don't own or maintain and you hope that Reddit will allow you to use indefinitely for free without showing adverts that they sell and keeps them in business.
You should be fine though... unless someone else significantly larger causes Reddit to redefine policies on content usage they'll just ignore this.
Context here is: All the integrations people built on top of Twitter before Twitter got serious about ensuring adverts were in the mix and they had control of the presentation of content.
Velocio-
I hear you, but the plan is to continue to scale and include redundancies for these things in the future. For now, Imgur is solid and I hope we can rely on it for another 5 years. Before that time is up I hope to have support for S3 buckets and whatever Googly store I can hack into this. Redundancies are important for when, say, Imgur goes down. If Imgur goes down so does BikeTag.Org.
Reddit, as a forum, is great. The API they provide is awesome, and we can crosspost really easily. We plan to turn r/biketag into a global leaderboard that has crossposts from all of the games we track worldwide. But Reddit is also not the healthiest community, and garnering trust amongst Redditors can be very difficult. ( I was actually remarking, this morning, about how nice y'all have been so far. I try to be kind and respectful and to be as enthusiastic about this endeavor as I can be but some people just don't like "outsiders" -- definitely a US thing.)
No matter who came up with what or who did it first and where, there are way more BikeTag games out there than we know, and discovering this forum shows me that we still have a lot more work to do on our history.
BikeTagOrg
We are attempting to solve for the issues of things getting old and being deleted/archived.
The site runs on no database, a strategy I am hoping to be able to continue to employ. All images are uploaded to Imgur, which is public, into an album created by our Imgur account. All of the data for each tag is contained in the Imgur image, including the credit for the person who tagged it as well as the hints/found locations. (we are also looking to add GPS coordinates in the near future, for doing auto verification of new mystery tags as well as providing an interactive MAP). Basically, you don't need BikeTag.Org to see all of the data that you see ON BikeTag.Org.
Because we don't run a database, all of the data is out there. The website code, similarly, is open sourced and the content is public there. When we create Reddit posts (for threaded discussions, much like this forum), those posts are public.
We certainly expect that these larger platforms will be around a while. Using Imgur and Reddit and NOT Facebook is our way of trying to make the game as readily available for as long as possible.
We also have a lot of features currently in the works to automate and add more fanciness. We have a leaderboard (@ /leaderboard for a given geo for you sleuths out there) that is currently in development and a user profile page where users can see their own individual tags. These features are all being driven by a BikeTag API that I am developing to make the data, and how we compile it, available for anyone to mash and mold and do with however they please. Chicago's game has a cool new dashboard at https://sarahlikesbikes.com/chibike/ which is built using Tableau. I don't have those Tableau skills but I am doing what I can to enable others who do have such skills to be able to create whatever.