So the best way to ensure ideas can be expressed effectively is to ban any form of imagery and limit people's means of communication to text only? This is broken logic.
You're not limited to text. You can easily include a direct link to an image, and readers can access the image with a single click. It's not a huge barrier.
How can you judge their worth anyway?
With links instead of embedded images,
readers will judge the worth of images before clicking on them.
But there are many ways you can prevent the linking of dynamic images, and thus prevent cookie stuffing.
Either the forum needs to check and recheck images constantly, which is expensive, or client-side code needs to be used to prevent large images, which might not work for all users. I don't find either of these solutions acceptable.
They do NOT use up any of this server's bandwidth. Are you kidding me? The request is not sent from this server, it is sent from the users viewing the images - using up the bandwidth the image is hosted on, not bitcointalk's bandwidth.
Obviously I was talking about the bandwidth of readers...
Turn down the fidelity of your browser's error reporting if it's a problem for you.
All major browsers will do
something different when viewing pages with mixed content. On Firefox and recent versions of IE the URL bar changes color. On older versions of IE a dialog box popped up on every such page.
Why not hold a vote on the issue to find out how correct your assumptions are?
I know that my security concerns are justified.
A vote would determine only what the majority of current users want, which is not very important. It's easy for the majority to be wrong.
These forums don't need to become 4chan just to allow photos, and what kind of an admin can't restrict sizes?
I like 4chan. On 4chan, every image is hosted locally, so there are no security problems, and each image is the same, small size until you
click on it. I want to do the same thing here, but without the thumbnail (since this is not an imageboard and images are not the central focus).
Fine. Fair point. So make sig images turned off by default, but let people turn them on if they choose! What you are proposing removes all choice entirely from the user. You are doing the very opposite of providing "freedom and choice" which you ironically use as justification for limiting those very things.
I'm fine with that:
SMF doesn't support this. If it did, I would definitely allow the option of showing signature images.
I'd add it now if I could figure out how to add a new user setting in a reasonable amount of time.
If you remove images there is a great "unknown" cost... all the good information that otherwise would've been conveyed, yet nobody will ever know about it or account for it.
I'm getting rid of
embedded images. Not images entirely. If you like images, you can click the image links. This works very well on IRC, 4chan, and the other sites/systems I mentioned previously.
Someone might not care about another user's mining stats, but what about an image that shows how many donations a charity has recieved?
It would be far down on my list of things to do, but I wouldn't be opposed to having the server fetch a small text file every once in a while to display in signatures/posts.
Bottom line: Allow signature images-- if I don't like them, I can add a greasemonkey user script to hide them in literally 30 seconds.
Like I said before, I think it's a better policy to assume that people don't want images. You can write a GreaseMonkey script to expand all directly-linked images in a few minutes, too.
here're more things to consider to disable:
emoticons
icons
css styles
js
as it is not real information and therefor completely worthless and offtopic, just taking extra space and bandwith
Emoticons probably will be eliminated with the next software. Images in the layout will be reduced. The other things are used to attractively structure data and create features. Even Bitcoin Block Explorer uses CSS and JavaScript.
I find avatars to be useful in quickly identifying posters, so I'm almost never annoyed by those. You can also disable seeing them in your settings.
