Are there any technical and or contractual and or aesthetic reasons that this board does not permit the poster to post pictures or illustrations; even free or fair use cases?
I think it was explained that a lot of people surf the dope at work and don’t want pictures to com e up when they scroll down a thread.
You can certainly post links to external pic hosting sites such as photobucket if you want to show an illustration.
My recollection (which may admittedly be fuzzy), is that:
[ol][li]Enabling inline pictures takes up too much bandwidth. (The speed at which the board loads has been the subject of regular complaints over the years, although it seems to have improved lately.)[/li][li]I’m not sure, but I think there’s no way to separately enable avatars from inline pictures, and most people don’t want avatars because:[ul][/li][li]they take up too much bandwidth if everyone does them[/li][li]they clutter the page.[/ul][/li][li]What **brewha **said.[/li][/ol]
If you allow pictures in all forums, you run the risk of people posting porn.
Which raises an issue that is feel is long overdue for discussion: by allowing the posting of words in all forums, we run the constant risk of seeing the f-word.
That’s right, the f-word.
I’d like to propose that we move to a system whereby posters simply select what they want to say from a list of preapproved posts. These could range from “Yes, I agree.” to “Dyno-MITE!!”
Brilliant analysis there, Giraffe. You know full well what the snackers will do if we allow pictures here. How many times do you want to open a thread and see a screen cap from 2 Girls 1 Cup or similar?
Except (work environment) you can’t see the words from across the room.
Also a lot of posters like the clean sterile look of this board. Allowing pictures and avatars and such the board could end up looking like this and with all the pictures it loads kind of slow.
I don’t really care either way as I would still post here but the simpleness of it is nice.
I like the stark look of this board. I visit Giraffeboards once in a while, but I admit all of the avatars and bright, happy colors do drive me away a bit. 
It might not exactly be NSFW, but some of the avatars can be a bit…silly? And loud.
As many times as possible, actually, but I’ve been told I’m a disgusting person.
I don’t really care if we allow pictures or not, I just found the gravely stated “there is a risk of porn” argument kind of funny. A troll could already post huge purple obscentities in fifty point font, or links that redirect you to porn or malware, or whatever – most of them don’t bother, because on a moderated site they’re immediately banned. Images aren’t that different, risk-wise.
Yeah they are, particularly when you have a known element of malcontents out there. On the board I used to moderate, a certain group of banned posters would dig around in the archives, find threads where they’d posted images hosted somewhere they controlled, and replace the inoffensive, on topic pictures previously posted with some of the most disgusting stuff I’ve ever seen. I’m not enough of a techie to know exactly how they did it, but I do know I had to delete way more of that crap than I ever wanted to see…and several innocent posters were shocked and offended by those images.
When we allowed images in every forum, several people treated us to pics of goatse. Once seen, that image cannot be unseen. Og knows I’ve tried. And that is completely NSFW. Now, work filters might screen for forbidden words like fuck, but they usually don’t screen for images. But a word or two can’t be read unless the reader is standing over the surfer’s shoulder, whereas it’s quite possible to see goatse or lemonparty across the room.
We also had problems with people posting copyrighted images, even people who should really, really know better.
I’m not sure if we still have bandwidth problems that would preclude us from allowing images in all forums. I know it was a big problem back in the day.
Mostly, though, I think it’s aesthetics. I love kitty pics as much as the next person, and even I have managed to figure out how to get a free photo account to upload my pics.
As long as you are a member, you can turn that off. Same goes for all images (I believe, I will check after I post this*). That’s the way I have my account set-up.
*my internet connection is flakey at the moment so switching to a new site isn’t practical
EDIT—yep, and I assume the same could be done here.
Many of our users read this site at work. We don’t want them to have to explain “goetse” to their boss – or maybe lose a job over it.
It’s because of images like goetse – forced upon us by people who thought that was really, really funny – that’s why we limit pictures to the Marketplace forum.
Pictures also eat up bandwidth and, as Lynn pointed out, have been a recurrent copyright annoyance.
All in all, it’s just not worth the hassles.
They can just turn them off. It’s not that difficult. And if they are really worried about losing their jobs over something like that, perhaps they shouldn’t be surfing at work at all.
My guess is this is the real reason, and the first one is just a lip-service excuse.
I like the lack of pictures and avatars - it makes for much easier-on-the-eyes reading and a nice clutter-free feeling. That said, the “bandwidth” excuse is just wrong. Yes, if the images were hosted on this board, then bandwidth would be a problem. But there could be images enabled without hosting any from this board, which is how most images on most other message boards work.
It didn’t start out being that way but that’s how things have evolved here over time. I don’t think it’s a bad thing, myself – we’ve always said “use your words.”
And besides, you can post a link to a picture – you just can’t host it here.
Threads and comments like this remind me of one of my favorite posts of all time.
It’s in this thread. Read the OP, then scroll down to post #8.
And you can turn that off as well (in your browser settings, not your account settings). I had to turn them back on to see the different font size.
So, these preapproved posts would be in lieu of the f-word and the c-word then?
Dyno-MITE!!
CMC fnord!
Damn it, tricked by the long necked, prehensile tongued, horse-like critter again!
Where’s Admiral Ackbar when ya really need him?