Attachments advice

[RTK]

Hotlinking does't work with all hosting services... There are features on some servers that prevent images to be served to externally requested urls.

And as mentioned below in one of my posts - free hosting services (and external servers in general) can be painfully slow... Making threads painfully slow to load (no matter the connection you have). And as images are removed - you end up with only image place holders, which can end up making great threads look kind of sad.

Scroll way down in this thread and note the "Posting rules" at the lower left which states HTML code is OFF. This means you cannot use HTML code on this particular board, unless the admins decide to switch it on. But this brings the risk of some nasty sabotage by vandals who wanna disrupt this forum.
Of course, like you said, the vB img tag works, which is sufficient enough
Many sites like photobucket even provide you with the vB tag of your picture

[The Alien]

Hotlinking does't work with all hosting services... There are features on some servers that prevent images to be served to externally requested urls.

And as mentioned below in one of my posts - free hosting services (and external servers in general) can be painfully slow... Making threads painfully slow to load (no matter the connection you have). And as images are removed - you end up with only image place holders, which can end up making great threads look kind of sad.

Yup, you're absolutely right on that

[AntonyF]

Risto Klint has replied a lot, but just wanted to say a bit more and answer a few questions.

I can imagine it's getting pretty large. Does vBulletin actually embed the graphics in it's database?

Yes, it does.

Those of us who have our own web hosting could post our screen shots and images in our own accounts and then put a url in our TG posts. That might help.

Well we have no objections about that, but there's not a requirement. Allow me to clarify some more.

All I am suggesting is that people think about whether the image they are posting adds something to the thread. I'm not saying don't use our disk space. It's just in many cases I think an image is beign posted when in fact just text could be used. An image uses diskspace and bandwidth (wherever it is hosted) so if text is viable, it should be used. It also saves people the download time. The other angle is that if you are posting an image, just consider if it can be cropped or compressed or posted in a better format, but this isn't so much of an issue.

Posting images remotely does pose some issues in that if those images disappear the threads are left with broken images. Pruning old topics also is hard because it's good to have an archive, and it'd be hard to judge what is important or not. And it took me about 5 years to import from the old system to here, I like old topics.

So there's nothing wrong at the moment. It's not like we're running out of disk space, and these aren't rules or anything. Just for the long term good of the board I want to advise people not just to think before posting an attachment. "Can this just as well be said in text?" and, if posting an image, "Is this the optimal way to convey what I want?"

Of course most images are coming about because people want to help, and that's great. It's always harder to advise people when they're trying to be helpful and I don't want people to feel on edge posting. Post away, I just ask that you keep this advice in mind.

Thank you.

[RedWombat]

Thanks Anthony and Risto. Very valid points. I can see how a dead image link could be a huge bummer for a new Xara user down the road.