If the SDMB had img code turned on the following would be a neat little clickable thumbnail of the above. But alas, it doesn’t, and it’s just a link to the thumbnail of the above pic.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v98/lobley/th_fire.jpg
Edit: I’m sure they have their reasons. If I remember they seem to be that allowing image code would cause this place to descend to the immaturity levels of other MBs. Personally I think the root cause of the immaturity of other MBs is not that they allow images.
But I am always happy and willing to be corrected where my theory is incorrect.
That’s one reason. But there are also copyright concerns and bandwidth concerns. Posting images on one page which are hosted elsewhere is sometimes considered bandwidth theft, and some image owners get very upset about it (yes, they want people to see their images, but they want them to see them in the context of their own web pages). And it could quickly become a nightmare for the mods to decide who owns each image, and whether they’ve given permission.
But many image hosters seem to be of the opposite opinion (like mine) they seem to encourage the use of images that are not contained within the context of their websites.
I pay for a subscription to my image hoster, and in return they allow me to post thumbnails and images to any site I like with no bandwitdth restrictions.
I must apologise for the fact that my reasoning is hindered by the fact that I have been drinking a lot, but I stand by my opinion that most image hosting websites would not have a problem with a respectable MB such as this displaying the images they host.
Image embedding could presumably be made a privilege of membership - that would eliminate 99% of the potential for goatse-type shock images. The other 1% (for that particular problem) would only ever do it once, and after they were banned, it would become even less frequent.
I’m sure it’s probably not a standard feature of vB, but one conceptual way around the bandwidth theft issue would be to allow people to link only to images hosted at one domain, specified in their user profile. This wouldn’t stop copyright abuse though, of course.
It doesn’t sound like it would be too hard also to restrict the number or size of images within a single post, but again, I don’t know if this is a feature of vB.
There have been numerous occasions on which I would like to have been able to embed an image (usually a diagram or graph) into a post. Linking to it so that it can be clicked and viewed separately is distinctly second best.
I do understand people’s reservations on this matter - I even share them a little, but I’ve said the same about editing in the past, and we can do that now, and the world didn’t end.
“Goatse” was a big problem for us but not the only problem; the need to shock and annoy is very large in some folks.
Most of our members seem to prefer the site with no images, no thumbnails or avatars. Certainly it’s easier to police, especially when it comes to having to vet for appropriateness, copyright violation, etc.
That being said we could revisit this issue. I’d like to see how the membership at large feels about it. Discussion with the staff off the public board is also needed. I’ll start that now.
The worst potential problem, I think, would be inadvertent obcenity if someone embedded an image from a site like Slashdot, where their server is set up to replace it with something nasty if externally linked.
After consultation with the rest of the staff and discussion of all the various potentially thorny issues involved, we’ve decided te continue as we have and not allow image files.
One of the positive attributes of this site is how clean and uncluttered it looks without images. We’ve always emphasized the words here anyway and that hasn’t changed. My apologies to all the visually-oriented among you who prefer a picture to a thousand words.
We’ve also considered the many other problems allowing images would bring us, including possible stress on the system and the greatly added workload that would come in the wake of having to vet every single image for suitability and copyright. We have enough issues now with content that is NSFW and copyright protected and hesitate to add on more resonsibility. I don’t run out of work to do here now and our intrepid moderators run out of time far sooner than they run out of things to look at here.
We do want to give this community as much as we possbly can; it’s not always feasible to give everything you might prefer.
