Poll questions to follow OP shortly.
Speaking more or less officially, we are NOT going to allow images. We’ve done it before, and between socks posting goatse, content spammers posting porn, and regular posters posting copyrighted images (and being told, over and over, not to do it), we are almost certainly not going to allow it again.
I wonder what happens if I try to use the tags anyways:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/image.php?u=79433&dateline=1268899883&type=profile
Aw. it just gives a standard link. So there’s no way I could design a Firefox plugin that would insert the images for people who want to use them. Wierd aaron’s script that shows them when you put your mouse over the link will have to do.
Also, I wonder why copyrighted images are less of a problem when they are linked. Unless you link to the page and not the image, the other sites are still not going to get properly compensated for their work.
Whenever I see this I always have to wonder why I am not seeing this problem on other message boards that allow inline images. Most of them are quite juvenile too, facebook game site forums and such.
I am guessing those sites require a lot more moderating, and more moderators.
Lynn. I appreciate images are never going to happen and why not. But to be fair I’m not asking if they will happen, or for them to happen. I’m simply asking what people think by asking this poll.
Personally I think the member-base of the SDMB is mature enough to use the feature sensibly and properly. I think that the inability to post images has/had nothing to do with the uniqueness of the board. But that’s just my opinion.
But there is a Firefox plugin. It’s called Text-to-Image and will convert any image link into a visible thumbnail image in your browser.
For example, if I post a link to an image of Gary Sinise
without the plugin, you would just see a link, but with the plugin, you would see the image as if it were enabled on the Dope without leaving the Dope page. It is not necessary to mouse over the link, but if you mouse over the image, it expands it and if you double-click on it, it displays it full page.
There’s no option in the poll that really matches what I think, so I’ll just say it. I think that most members would use images responsibly and in a way that would improve the board, but that there’s just enough jerks who’d ruin it that it wouldn’t be worthwhile.
There might also be practical considerations: Right now, if someone asks a question or gives an answer that depends critically on an image, they’ll generally put it up on Photobucket or Flickr or some such, and put in a link to it. Those who are sufficiently interested will click on the link and view the image. But if the images were inline, then everyone who opened the thread would get it, which might be too many hits for a free account on one of those sites, and we’d be left with “Image temporarily unavailable”.
Most of the members are mature enough. However, it’s been tried in the past, and the few members who are NOT mature enough to responsibly use the image tag have forever ruined it for the rest.
One thing to remember is how obsessed the Dope is with avoiding copyright problems.
While I’ve seen ones that don’t do goatse and stuff (especially since that’s cow completely out of style), I’ve never seen one that handles the copyrighted images thing. Sure, they don’t hotlink, but they do copy the image from another site and rarely discuss it enough to qualify it as fair use.
While I’m sure some people would like that, I’d prefer to only see images that were intended to be inline, I prefer the hover version for just plain links. I also am not a big fan of images changing size on hover, as it messes with the layout of the rest of the page.
But I’ll look into the plugin and see if I can tweak it to my liking.
Lots of people read the Dope from work – we don’t want to put them in the position of having goatse appear on their screen while they’re looking at threads on the board.
For those that don’t know what I’m talking about that’s the image that caused us to disable image view forever. Go google it, but not at work.
For people who have to worry about the internet police at work (and I’m one of them, working for the government), they can just disable image rendering in their browsers. Leaving it up to each and every individual web site to do content filtering is not an efficient model. It should be done on the client side.
We have pretty explicit drug and sex conversations here, why not protect us from those too? Surely an employer would not be happy about their employee participating in that. What are you waiting for? Protect us!!
Any employer that permits discretionary surfing will understand that random naughty bits may appear from time to time. For those that have a zero-tolerance policy about it, they probably don’t allow surfing in the first place.
I’m not trying to argue or change the tide, and I know that this policy will probably never change. And I know the administration doesn’t need to provide any reasons for anything it does. I’m just trying to point out that the given reasons aren’t very good ones.
What exactly is the problem with banning people who abuse the feature?
FTR, I am against enabling it, I just don’t see why if you wanted it enabled you don’t because a handful of griefers. Talk about the terrorists winning.
Huh. I always thought the copyright thing was a bigger deal. There were really people who kept on posting goatse and similar pictures that didn’t get banned?
And I still wonder why those same people wouldn’t also do a Rick Roll type thing and use an innocuous looking link to get you there.
Again, I am assuming it would be too much policing for the number of (unpaid) moderators. Easy just to leave it disabled.
You said this a lot nicer than I would have. I would have said that people at work should be working, not worried about inappropriate images popping up.
FTR (not that my opinion matters), I would not use the feature myself and would turn it off on my side; but I find it ironic that other sites have no problems and this one (self described as full of the “smartest and hippest people on the internet”) cannot deal with it.
Interestingly enough, I read this thread via tapatalk and the linked image of Gary Sinise appeared as if it was embedded via [image] tag. Wouldn’t that be great if all regular browsers could make up for a site’s shortcomings like that.
Or better yet, don’t Google it. If you don’t already know what goatse is, you probably don’t want to know. Short version is, it’s a very explicit picture of a scenario that very few people are interested in.
Let me describe Goatse. In that image, you can get a clear view of a man’s tonsils…from the wrong end. Plus, he clearly has a place to put a spare bowling ball.
Whereas I would say it is an explicit picture of a scenario that far too many people seem to be interested in.
How do you know it’s a man? Can you see his adam’s apple too?