Until the photo storage places started charging many people put the photos there and had links. I think photo bucket was a popular one, that changed and wanted fee's if you had them open for others to see. If you did not pay your link to outside places like this bulletin board where no longer available.

On another bulletin board I am on picture storage on the board is very limited, and I never used a photo storage service so to add new I need to delete some old ones. This site might be like that not sure after update.

For what little I can add to the initial question about the gap between the view counts and actual postings - I can only speak from my own perspective on this, but in years past I simply had more free time to login daily (sometimes 3 times each day beginning on "lunch break" at my previous job, then "coffee break" in the afternoon, and once more later in the evening after everything had settled down for the day). It was a convenient way to help pass the time when on that very fixed schedule and also provided ample opportunity to type out postings, ask questions, or try to help answer them. Now that I'm more in business for myself, most of those slow periods of the day have disappeared and I find myself hustling from one project to another all day every day (weekends included) and the time I spend at a keyboard now is spent trying to answer as many YT comments as possible whenever I get a few spare minutes, with little left over for anything else. So the majority of time, I just pop in here every few days without logging in, browse for any new postings, maybe scan two or three that seem interesting and I'm back out again, because by that point I'm just plain tired and don't have the ambition left to actually log in and then resume typing yet again. That's just my perspective, but the initial observation about the discrepancy between views (which indicates traffic) and actual postings (which indicates participation) was a good one that I think bears some looking into. Being part of the problem myself, I have also noticed that the forums I used to frequent regularly a few years ago have all slowed down by a noticeable amount when it comes to new posts/discussions.

Another mathematics problem
expensive seed corn  plus high priced ground plus no rain equals disaster.

The number of views is pretty much pointless on this free forum. There are some forums where the view count is an accurate reflection of the number or people who have viewed a thread but not this one. View count at this post was 419 and I have viewed this thread once for each post and each time the view count went up by one so my visits alone count for at least 13 views.
You also need to keep in mind that at any one time there are no more than a handful of people on the forum and this forum is tiny compared to others.
239057 total messages. Another machinery forum I visit has over 6.5 million messages.

For me I only post when I absolutely have to in order to find out what I need to know or to correct misinformation which thanks to one member there is an abundance of. We have also lost a lot of good posters in the last couple of years, CCJersey, EDB and even Mike Meyer who rarely posts these days.
I don't know what the solution is going forward but you can't expect this forum to be the answer to the membership problems. I also find it strange that the people on this forum seem to think that this is the only place to find that information and that ACMOC has some copyright on the information presented here by members.

This is an interesting observation. In my situation I don't post a lot primarily because I don't have the in-depth knowledge that many here do. I wish I could contribute more, but I am kind of a "figure it out as you go" mechanic (I use that term with some hesitation).

I think a lot about how to maintain a vibrant club, I see the forum as an essential part of it, but I also think that forums in general have at least in part been replaced by the significant amount of information on YouTube which also provides an element of entertainment. There's nothing intentional about it, it is just the way technology has evolved over the last twenty years. As a result, if you have time to spend on a hobby like this, it's likely that you'll do that on the sites that are most enjoyable for you.

I think that the key to a vibrant club is member involvement in any form. That has to come from each one of us. A conscious decision to be involved is what is required, whether that's here on the forum, stepping forward to hold a Chapter event, even lodging a complaint, and more. All of those things show interest and enough care that the organization continues to exist that you take some kind of action however small it may seem.

I keep bees as a hobby, and most people think that the queen directs the health and welfare of the colony, in reality, she's only a part of it, the "hive" makes the decisions including when to replace their queen. I would submit that a healthy club is much the same, the collective actions of the membership will determine the overall well-being of the organization.

I don't know that any one person will have "the" answer, but I am confident that as a whole we could.