some image hosting sites are blocked, such as image shack (separated the two words), when typed together, *** appears like this.
why is it blocked? because people don't register an account and just randomly upload images and link them, and over a certain period of time, those images expire and get replaced with random ads.
people who have created accounts have images that won't expire, but because of their policy with their non account linked images, they screwed over those of us with accounts.
a solution would be to upload them to another image hosting site, such as imgur.
i originally used image shack, moved to photobucket when it got blocked, and moved to imgur when photobucket killed itself. i've tried tinypic and would highly recommend using anything else.
of everything i've used so far, imgur has been by far the best for uploading images without restrictions, and it's easy to organize and categorize your images into albums.
when copying images, you want either the direct link or bbcode (which is basically the direct link with the ... tags around it already). no need for tags unless you're trying to link it to another place in the forum.