And, we’ve always allowed people to link to images; they just didn’t show up within the text of the post.
IMHO there are halfway-reasonable arguments both for and against allowing people to post images on the SDMB. If I were casting a vote right now, it would be to allow them on a trial basis and see how things go.
But I think it’s silly to talk about what year it is as an argument for images. Text is not obsolete (cite: all the text-only books that are still being published); images aren’t a more modern or more advanced way to communicate; and just because you can add a feature doesn’t mean that doing so necessarily makes things better (cite: Clippy).
Partly correct. But what year it is is, in fact, relevant to any counter-argument that images take up bandwidth and storage space, since both of those are generally plentiful. So is processing power, which allows more and more sophisticated boards like this one to exist and, in general, web-based functionality that would have been unimaginable in the early days of HTML.
The moral of Clippy is that when a wide range of functionality is available, it can be incompetently implemented or, as in the case of inline images, potentially abused. But the solution to the latter, IMHO, is to have policies in place to prevent such abuse, not to disable a very useful function. Pictures can be instructive, and pictures can can be fun, too, which is not a sin. To say that a picture is worth a thousand words may be a hackneyed old aphorism, but it is in fact an understatement.
I note, by the way, that the pictures in the Pet Picture Thread have magically reappeared (at least, at the time of this writing). The thread remains closed while TPTB think about the best policies going forward with regard to inline pictures, and that’s fine, but I urge folks to take a look at it. Some might say “blech! I don’t come here to see pics of people’s cats and dogs” and that’s fine, you can ignore the thread based on its title. But objectively, the worst that can be said about it is “harmless”, and personally I found it cute and entertaining.
I do think the image issue coild be handled with good moderation. Something like this:
“The Straight Dope Message Board allows embedded images. However, images shoild only be used when they are relevant and advance the conversation. ‘Meme’ Gifs, out-of-context pictures and other unacceptable images will be removed without warning. Continued abuse of the picture feature will get the poster an official warning, or a banning if the behaviiur is egregious and continues after being warned.”
Even better would be if mods have the ability to turn an inline image into a thumbnail. Then for margjnal cases, the mods could just thumbnail the image, perhaps with a boilerplate comment, “This image has been thumbnailed by the thumbnailer for being irrelevant or stupid or annoying.” If mods have to keep doing that for the same users, they can be officially warned to knock it off or dial it back.
The board has been exceptionally good utilizing peer pressure to persuade users to conform to the excepted norms.
Obvious examples. Occasionally we’ll have a new user posting in l337 5p34k or other annoying styles. Regular users first advise them that we prefer they don’t. Noob responds with you’re not the boss of me, I’ll do what I want. Regulars move on to pointing/laughing/denigrating/ignoring. New user either moves on to other boards or adapts to the community norms.
So sure, enable embedded pics. We’ll reach consensus about what’s acceptable.
This is kind of what I was thinking. Perhaps allow in some forums and not others, or perhaps even create a forum where pictures are encouraged and allowed.
Ok, here is what I found: if I just paste in a complete image url, Discourse interprets it and starts copying (“uploading”) the image and the whole thing goes to shit. But if I mangle it before pasting it in (in the above case, what I pasted in began with “htt:imgs”) and subsequently fix it (by adding in the “ps” and the two slashes), Discourse fails to do the copy and merely obtains a source preview (the whole image). A bit kludgy, but it seems to work.
This is what’s frustrating. Those graphics shouldn’t need to be edited out - they were never really there in the first place. Why don’t the hyperlinks just remain as hyperlinks so we can decide whether we want to view the image or not? Why are links to webpages being turned into previews that display an image? Or at least why can’t we have a setting to turn that “feature” off? And not just a theme, an actual setting that applies no matter what theme we use?
And avatars is no longer an option. Right now we see them whether we want to or not.
