You’d still be free to use Imgur if you wish… the built-in functionality doesn’t restrict your current options, just adds one more for people who want it. (Discourse is very common on the web, and many instances allow images. So it becomes muscle memory for people who use other forums too.)
But Chronos & LSLGuy’s point stands… probably not worth the risk to even ask.
No, posting images on discourse sites that allow it is super easy. I do that somewhat often, and never post images here because i don’t want to deal with creating an account somewhere to upload images to, and keeping track of a place i only use to post images here.
That being said, I’m firmly in the “don’t make waves, don’t increase costs” camp. I can live without uploading photos of my home construction, or whatever.
Images would modernize the board and make it more interesting to guests.
Text only boards are a relic of the 1990’s. I’m a relic that has user avatars turned off.
I know the board trends older. That fits me too. But we can stick a toe into the 2020’s water.
Can discourse automatically resize images?
Display them smaller in threads?
And who’s going to police the images to determine which is which?
Good thing we switched to Discourse years ago and we’ve been able to post images for a long time.
Also, at this point “modernizing” a message board is like modernizing a penny-farthing.
You do realize that we can post images here, yeah? We just can’t upload them directly into Discourse (which is what the OP is asking for); a link to an image from elsewhere on the web works just fine 99% of the time here.
(And, yes, a lot of us have been around long enough to remember when the SDMB did not support images on the board, at all.)
Edit:
This, for sure. The reason that our member base skews old has pretty much nothing to do with how easy or confounding it is to post images (or, Og forbid, videos 
), and everything to do with the fact that message boards, as a category, skew towards us old farts.
I thought sdmb made posting images difficult to discourage the practice?
I know it discourages me. I briefly consider it and usually decide it’s not worth the effort. I have posted a few images.
I think, based on this thread, and other things I’ve read since we switched to Discourse, that the SDMB does not allow direct uploads of images because it increases the total data footprint of the board on whatever servers we use, and which would, by extension, increase the cost of operating the board.
The image below comes from YouTube, and when the board software goes to create this page on your browser, it downloads the image from YouTube. If we were able to directly post images to Discourse, and I had done so with this same picture, then that picture would be saved on the SDMB server, and when you loaded this page, it would be downloaded from the SDMB server.
Right now, I suspect that the SDMB is effectively a rounding error on someone’s budget spreadsheet, but the more expensive we get to operate, the more likely that someone at Sun-Times Media or Chicago Public Media would actually start looking at these things, and wonder why the hell they are still paying to run a dinosaur of a message board.
And, at that point, the SDMB is finally gone.
Reddit is doing fine with message boards. There’s still a demand for them.
But, they are in decline.
I agree costs need to be held down. The news paper column used to attract people to the forum. It’s gone now.
It takes maybe a minute to post it to Imgur, grab the url, and paste it here.
The fact we have no management or technical administration to speak of certainly doesn’t help the board to be more responsive to changing times and changing customer expectations. Be that image upload or anything else.
This board is not anyone’s blog. This board is not anyone’s Facebook page. It has a different purpose, or at least a different feel, and the fact it’s still here 20+ years later says the purpose / feel is popular enough.
My own take is the trivial extra effort to upload images elsewhere and copy that link here serves as a high impact low effort check on content free OPs which would amount to “See my breakfast!” or “So pretty!”. The mods would certainly chastise those sorts of content-free OPs when expressed in words.
Anyone who has an account at an image hosting site already has the only hard part of posting an image at SDMB. The rest is simply lazy people whining. IMO.
Reddit is not really a message board, and certainly not the style of message board that we are.
There is a demand for what Reddit provides, sure, and that demand includes younger users. As has been described in a number of threads here on the topic, the experience on Reddit is very different from the experience here.
Also, FWIW, as far as I can tell, you can’t directly upload images to Reddit, either.
It took me 90 seconds to go to my page, upload a photo, check the photo, copy the URL, and paste it here. Posting to balky, kludgy Facebook often takes longer, especially posting from my phone.
You can. I have done it from my phone.
But still, creating an imgur account is the only “work” involved with posting images here. After you have an account, you just post your pic there, as you would here if that function were available - so far we’re even in terms of posting image steps for SDMB and imgur. But now there are two extra steps to post an image here: 1) copy the link to the image from imgur, and 2) go back to the SDMB comment window and paste the link on it’s own line there. It’s literally 15-30 seconds longer than if one were able to post directly to the board.
I, too, would be concerned with attracting attention leading to drama and questions about our very special existence. This issue just doesn’t seem painful enough to justify the risk of being noticed.
I don’t think this is some hill we have to die on or anything. It’s a totally normal thing to either allow OR disallow on forums, and there are perfectly reasonable arguments both for and against it.
Really, I’m just lazy (I like being able to paste a screenshot or drag an image directly into the text box, which is how I usually upload images in Discourse). And I like the in-page “lightbox” view and thumbnail grid that real uploaded images have, like on the official Discourse site, rather than the “open the source image in a new tab” behavior of linked images. But there are probably people who prefer it the opposite way too.
In any case, it’s not something I feel strongly about; I just thought it would be slightly more convenient. On any “normal” site, this would be trivial to set up, and none of the issues mentioned above are insurmountable. But the SDMB isn’t a normal site. Really, a site like this shouldn’t be able to exist on the modern web at all… we’re lucky our absentee owners have largely forgotten about us. It’s not worth attempting to solve these minor issues if it would only invite Sauron’s gaze.
Consider me convinced / talked down.
Heck, when we made the transition to Discourse in 2020, for the first couple of hours, direct image uploads were, in fact, enabled – I wonder if that was the default software setting. Very quickly thereafter, TubaDiva and the mods realized this, and disabled that setting.
Yeah, it’s a default setting on Discourse, but can easily be disabled for sites that don’t want it (that same page describes how to turn it off). It’s meant to be an option configurable by site owners.
Can I post a link to an image I have posted to Reddit here?
I have never posted images here and the only other site I’ve done that on recently is Reddit.
At one point I considered making it where you could upload an image to a specific Imgur amount and ake that into my tweaker script, but nowhere near enough people use it to justify the work.
I literally just open imgur, drag in the file or type Ctrl-V, and then get the URL of the image that uploads. Then I can past that URL here.
The only time SDMB exhibits that behavior is if the person who posted their image did an ignorant or sloppy job of it. Which is not exactly Discourse’s fault.
We still have users here who, 4 years later, cannot correctly operate the “quote a post” function.
Coddling the clueless and lazy is what brought twitter into the world. And look where that got us.