Is this really a Shakespeare quote? "A friend is one that knows you as you are, understands where you have been, accepts what you have become, and still, gently allows you to grow."

Not the first case of comic artists and evangelists having the same name.

I give you Billy Graham and Billy Graham.

This is correct. Discourse apparently has the ability to do this, but the SDMB doesn’t use it.

Our old vBulletin software didn’t allow image posting at all, but the changeover to Discourse enabled the ability to embed images that are hot-linked from somewhere on the Internet.

I thought it was a decision by the mods and admins. Newbies sometimes asked if image posing could be enabled. The reply was ‘we don’t want images cluttering up our board’ not ‘the software doesn’t allow it.’

Yeah, typically on vBulletin boards I’ve been on, you could use the [img] tag to include a URL to an image in your post. SDMB did not allow this. With Discourse, they seem to have relaxed that rule, so linking to images is allowed (YAY! It makes it so much easier illustrating what you’re talking about with an in-line image.) I’ve never used a message board, though, that allowed you to attach an image to your post from a local file on your computer. (I’m sure there must be some out there that do.) So it’s not at all unusual to me that the SDMB doesn’t want to waste their server space on hosting our images.

This is the critical reason why SDMB doesn’t host its own local image storage. TPTB didn’t want to spring for more disk space, considering how much they already have to pay just for the database of messages going back more than 20 years.

Posting pictures on sites like imgur works perfectly cromulently.