I think the initial goal was to reproduce the text-only style of the old forum. But posters quickly learned that discourse often displays linked posts. And our unfortunately no longer admin, Tubadiva, decided to let posters do that so long as the images were appropriate, as something of an experiment, to be halted if we started to get nasty images. But no hosting. Then Tubadiva died, and no decisions have been made since.
At least, that’s my understanding of how we got to where we are.
The reason for no inline images was because it’s ripe for abuse. You can post anything you want and it’s unavoidable for others to see, no matter what it is (or it could contain malicious code). It also used to crash browsers back then, but that’s less of an issue these days.
I think a lot of that good-intentioned playful flaunting of rules that occasionally took place in the early days (to the point of annoying) no longer has novelty value and we’ve all matured out of it, but that’s for us old timers. Who knows what might happen when there’s a more visible generational shift, and it’s all rowdy teens, with their leather jackets, transistor radios, and long hair.
I remember you saying that you wanted to be able to post a graph in a study in another thread, so yes, I was partly referring to you. But I seem to remember other mods putting up pictures also.
That’s my understanding as well. Except I’m not sure that explains why some linked images work and others don’t.
From what I’m gathering from some of the other posts, there may be ways to get around the block. IF (big if ) that’s true, would that be amenable to tptb as long as the SDMB doesn’t host the images?
We are working on this behind the scenes with the Powers That Be, because I generally agree that some of the configuration options here right now just – in my opinion – don’t make a whole lot of sense.
Thank you! Much appreciated.
[insert picture of a thank you with a smilie face here]
Well, as far as “smilie face” you have unicode emoji for that… 
in Windows press win+. to access the emoji chooser
in OS X press cmd+ctrl+space
in mobile, press the emoji button on the keyboard to access the emoji chooser
the Discourse editor also has a web based emoji chooser via the smile face on the toolbar
Thanks, Unicode consortium!
Hmm… interesting. The only time I’ve ever gotten that error is when I accidentally cut and pasted an image instead of an image URL. Meaning, I right clicked on the image I wanted to post, clicked on “Copy Image” instead of “Copy Image URL” and when I pasted it, text would show up with an image tag and a file name, but the preview would have the error mentioned in the OP.
Otherwise, I’ve never seen that error message. A plain URL always previews and posts fine for me. It’s when I’m in a hurry and copy the wrong thing that I see that.
It may indeed be as simple as that. I’m just hoping for some official confirmation that that’s the trigger.
Test.
Ok, I managed to get the can’t embed media in post another way. The normal way above shows fine. Just a bare URL. But I did the url nested in [ img ] tags like you do on some other boards and it gave me the error when I put the URL between those tags. Now that I think of it, that happened to me before as the other board I visit does images that way, and it’s force of habit for me to do inline images that way.
Well, now you know not to do that,and how to fix it if you do and Discourse complains
It’s Discourse. Most of your previous forum habits have no applicability here.
Um … no duh. I’m trying to help the OP out with possible reasons they are getting the error message. I like Discourse.