Simple Machines Community Forum

Excellent!  - What will be the image handling options / policy going forwards? We REALLY need 'one click uploading / resizing' built in and more image storage options, e.g. off server.   :D :D :D

we are in RC. There will be no major code changes which are not required to fix problems and it is unlikely that any new features will be added at this point

Quote from: Kindred on April 16, 2019, 07:55:18 AM
we are in RC. There will be no major code changes which are not required to fix problems and it is unlikely that any new features will be added at this point

When will they be looking at those options?

... or should I start looking elsewhere? 

That's what mods are for, you should be looking at those.

Over the many years I've used SMF, the standard answer to 'It's stopped working', is 'Uninstal any Mods!'   
 
1. Most Mod also 'break' when updates released, 
2. Many Mods are years out of date and   
3. Often the Mod has left the planet or otherwise lost interest! 
The main reason I've stuck with SMF is that it is very stable.... WITHOUT Mods ..... but it's feeling very old and creaky these days...  :'(   

QuoteOver the many years I've used SMF, the standard answer to 'It's stopped working', is 'Uninstal any Mods!'   

That's because we need to know whether you have an issue with SMF or with a mod.

Quote1. Most Mod also 'break' when updates released,

If you are talking about large updates, ie: 2.0 to 2.1, yes. Otherwise, no, most mods do not break between minor patches.

Quote2. Many Mods are years out of date and   

Some mods simply do not need an update. They still work fine even if they are years old. Minor patches don't really change much in the SMF code for them to need to update their mod every time a release is made, and that is the idea.

Quote3. Often the Mod has left the planet or otherwise lost interest!

Assuming you meant "mod authors", that is true, but that's really to be expected when they are giving out mods for free. They can't hang around forever. In those cases you're still likely to find someone else to help you.


All that said, there's different types of mods out there, some more stable and well built than others. The auto-resizing feature you mentioned might still be added in a future version, but SMF is built on the premise that you'll use mods for extra features not in core.

I was going to answer point by point... but looks like Gwenwyfar has already done so...

Basically, the only thing that I would correct is your initial statement and Gwen's response.

The first response has never been "uninstall any mods".
Although that is actually the first response to most queries over at WordPress (uninstall all other add-ons)...  At SMF, our initial repsonse is (invariably) What version of SMF, what version of php/mySQL, what is yoru forum URL and what mods do you have installed.

Typically -- most questions/problems are actually answerable with the facts from those questions -- at least 50% of the issues have actually already been reported (usually regarding a specific mod) and many of those are fixable with a quick code edit or two (which again, many have alreayd been provided)

Yes -- adding mods adds complexity to your site. However, the reason those mods exist is that complexity was desired for some, but not for most - which is possibly why it was not included in the code product -- and also why someone saw fit to make it into a packaged mod that can often be installed with a total of 3 clicks...

The system that allows for the simple application of mods is one fo SMF's primary strengths and allows site owners to take the core system and customize it -- while also allowing others to do their own cusotmizations, resulting in very different sites from the core product.

At one point in 2.0, I had 250+ mods installed on a site with fairly minimal manual edits (all because of overlapping code edits, but all simply resolved). The result looked very little like a standard forum when all the options were turned on...
On that forum - while I was running tests, I was able to update through 3 versions of SMF 2.0.x without breaking anything....

Quote from: ModelBoatMayhem on April 15, 2019, 11:07:54 PM
Excellent!  - What will be the image handling options / policy going forwards? We REALLY need 'one click uploading / resizing' built in and more image storage options, e.g. off server.   :D :D :D

Who is this "We" you're talking about, and why is one-click uploading so important to them that everybody has to drop everything else to implement it right now? Also, why is the current 2.1 situation so unbearable to you?

• "reply" button,
• text field (and type your reply),
• open attachment menu,
• drag-and-drop image,
• "upload" button,
• "post" button

Sure, you could remove step 3 by always having the attachment menu open, but depending on the forum, it will never be used and always take up space.
I think the first priority of a forum should not be images, but text "uploading". Image uploading enhancements, especially when you want to do them without posting text in your "forum", is exactly what mods should do.

Quote from: m4z on April 16, 2019, 01:50:37 PM

Quote from: ModelBoIyhem on April 15, 2019, 11:07:54 PM

Who is this "We" you're talking about, and why is one-click uploading so important to them that everybody has to drop everything else to implement it right now? Also, why is the current 2.1 situation so unbearable to you?

   
• "reply" button,
• text field (and type your reply),
• open attachment menu,
• drag-and-drop image,
• "upload" button,
• "post" button

Sure, you could remove step 3 by always having the attachment menu open, but depending on the forum, it will never be used and always take up space.
I think the first priority of a forum should not be images, but text "uploading". Image uploading enhancements, especially when you want to do them without posting text in your "forum", is exactly what mods should do.

'Text isn't the only Medium!

'The "we" is the 7,000+ members of my Forum.

I don't want / expect it "now" but it doesn't even appear to be on the books.

v2.1 - Only geeks ( like me ) want to resize photos for uploading! Everyone else wants / Expects 'Single Click' photo uploads... you must have you visited some of other Forums and other social sites on the Global Super Highway?

I understand if it's just too difficult coding-wise, beyond the scope or outside the SMF remit... I just think SMF missing a major trick here and any new SMF user, it will be very high up on their list of core requirements!

"especially when you want to do them without posting text in your "forum", is exactly what mods should do." - I don't even know what that means?!?

It's currently 2019, so if 'the governance' of SMF  say that 'One Click'  photo / video uploads will never become a core option, best to  say so now.
I'm sort of locked in to SMF for now but not out of loyalty ( this is the internet after all! ) but just because it a major pain in the arse to move or convert to a new platform but it won't always be a deal breaker.
Please don't take this as criticism of ANYONE associated with the coding of SMF, I think you are doing a sterling job as you are doing it as hobby not a day job, many personal thanks.SMF has always been a friend to me, especially as it's "free"..... I  just have concerns for it's future. 
 
( Many thanks for your time and the very considered replies so far. )   :)


-

Please don't take it as criticism when that's *exactly* what it is? And you clearly don't think it's a sterling job because of the intensity of your reaction here.

The problem is, if SMF were to stop and implement this now, it'll be another 2-3 years before 2.1 comes out which screws it up for everyone. It's already been too long getting here. This should not be considered for 2.1 - but maybe for 2.2.

That also said, the mentality of SMF has always been about people *talking to each other* with pictures being attached to a message, not the core of the message. 2.1 does improve this, you can now put attachments into the body of the message with little effort, but the reality is that the core priority of SMF has always been - and should always be - people writing messages for each other. Everything else should, and must, by definition be secondary.

I'm not saying it can't be improved, but it must be done carefully - and we must remember not to build for the minority. One of the open source organisations I work with has exactly this problem; they've just geared up having spent most of the last 6 months on a new feature that, as far as I can tell, only one of their customers is going to use and that it flat out doesn't work for any of their other customers without code changes which, frankly, their customers are not in a position to make anyway.

The majority of forums are not visual or heavy on attachments - we have sufficient evidence to support that position. The vast majority are text based, exchanging conversation - that absolutely must be the priority. Would that change if the features were better? Maybe, but unlikely.

Also, what does 'one click uploading' even mean? I literally do not understand how to do one click uploading in ANY platform. Every single platform I can think of requires a flat minimum of 2-3 clicks to do anything (yes, that includes Facebook). As for resizing, I'd strongly make that configurable rather than the default, there are plenty of times when I've uploaded large images with the intention of them NOT being resized and been frustrated when platforms do resize them, but those are cases you don't run into like sharing large structure diagrams of systems that have hundreds of tables. Just saying - if we support your use case, we have to support mine too as mine is just as important to me as yours is to you.

Quote from: ModelBoatMayhem on April 18, 2019, 12:58:48 AM
'Text isn't the only Medium!

I was mainly referring to the pre-Internet definition of the term "forum" (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/forum#Noun), but I really do think text is the primary Thing in online forums as well; I don't want the conversation to be polluted by images too much. But that depends on the kind of forum or site, and I probably avoid the kind of sites you're referring to. I receive enough picture posts in instant messaging group chats.

Quote from: ModelBoatMayhem on April 18, 2019, 12:58:48 AM
you must have you visited some of other Forums and other social sites on the Global Super Highway?

I actually haven't used such sites too much in the last 15 years, unless you count Github, bug trackers, mailing lists, and support forums of big corporations, which are mostly glorified text-only mailing-lists with a web UI (and always terrible to use).
(The only reason I got involved in SMF was that I needed an excuse to invest more time into my private server, so when a friend asked me to host a small private forum (which is, incidentally, about writing texts), I said yes; he had used SMF before. My primary reason for using this forum is improving SMF with bug reports etc.)

Quote from: ModelBoatMayhem on April 18, 2019, 12:58:48 AM

Quote from: m4z on April 16, 2019, 01:50:37 PMespecially when you want to do [image uploading, or benefit from image uploading enhancements] without posting text in your "forum", is exactly what mods should do."

I don't even know what that means?!?

You didn't specifiy how this one-click uploading should work and where your starting point was. I assumed you meant from "I'm currently viewing the topic, and I only want to upload images, (mostly) without postling text", hence the steps outlined above. Maybe you meant from "I've already clicked 'Reply' and typed my answer", in which case we currently have only three clicks.
If you really find these three clicks unbearable, go look for a Modification package, because (as Arantor has explained much better as I did) you're probably hugely over-estimating the importance that other forum users put on images, which are a side note in most forums.

Quote from: Arantor on April 18, 2019, 03:06:55 AM

Also, what does 'one click uploading' even mean? I literally do not understand how to do one click uploading in ANY platform. Every single platform I can think of requires a flat minimum of 2-3 clicks to do anything (yes, that includes Facebook). As for resizing, I'd strongly make that configurable rather than the default, there are plenty of times when I've uploaded large images with the intention of them NOT being resized and been frustrated when platforms do resize them, but those are cases you don't run into like sharing large structure diagrams of systems that have hundreds of tables. Just saying - if we support your use case, we have to support mine too as mine is just as important to me as yours is to you.

 
"what does 'one click uploading' even mean?" - Semantics,  no need to be pedantic.   ::)
 
Yes, resizing, reformatting  & storage options would be a must.
 
..... ah well, dreams and wishes!..... sigh.    :D
 

meh just resize it using bbcode options

Sure there's a need to be a pedant. Partially because I earn lots of money being professionally pedantic (it's called being a developer and I make good money spotting things other people don't because I'm professional-grade pedantic). Partially, though, because if you want to argue semantics, one click uploading exists. It's called drag and drop - you click, drag the file onto the SMF window and you're done, one click. The fact that this relies on however many clicks it takes to find the source and have both source and destination window on screen is not relevant. But that's my point: you cannot just be vague about this because someone *will* take your words and use them against you ;D

So, when you say 'one click uploading' what the hell do you actually mean? How do you refine it from 'drag and drop here' or 'click browse, find file, press upload'? Or is that part not the part you have a problem with, and it's the post-processing that needs attention? (This matters because it affects what work is potentially needed)

They're not dreams and wishes, they're entirely achievable, they just need to be realistic and realistically unless you want to make 2.1 be even later, they can't be in 2.1. But they're certainly candidates for improvement in 2.2.

I get why you might want resizing on the server - to save space. I get why you might want to push everything out to S3 for storage. But we also have to be realistic about building features that only a minority of people could use (because S3 might not be viable for many users; it will also inevitably lead to people wanting Azure and similar storage choices), and honestly I don't think people understand just how involved that *really* starts to get. I know because I do this kind of thing professionally on scales that scare people; I have one site that I manage currently moving 300GB of files over to S3 (and no, that wasn't a typo, they really do have three hundred gigabytes of files), and that gets... complicated for many many reasons.

It might seem like resizing to a max size is probably not a huge feature though it gets complicated when we support GD and multiple connectors for ImageMagick which all have to be done in different ways - and then people will want all the tooling as well to resize all existing attachments to the new setup. Which will naturally need to cope with those unusual sites that have thousands and thousands of files, so it needs to be able to resume where it left off and do it in chunks. Which is no longer 'just add a resize instruction' but probably several days of full time work.

Quote from: m4z on April 18, 2019, 03:26:41 AM

I actually haven't used such sites too much in the last 15 years, unless you count Github, bug trackers, mailing lists, and support forums of big corporations, which are mostly glorified text-only mailing-lists with a web UI (and always terrible to use).

That says a Lot!   :o

"In 2019, it is estimated that there will be around 2.77 billion social media users around the globe, up from 2.46 billion in 2017. Social network penetration worldwide is ever-increasing. In 2017, 71 percent of internet users were social network users and these figures are expected to grow."

Quote from: ModelBoIyhem on April 18, 2019, 12:58:48 AM

Quote from: m4z on April 16, 2019, 01:50:37 PMespecially when you want to do [image uploading, or benefit from image uploading enhancements] without posting text in your "forum", is exactly what mods should do."

I don't even know what that means?!?

You didn't specifiy how this one-click uploading should work and where your starting point was. I assumed you meant from "I'm currently viewing the topic, and I only want to upload images, (mostly) without postling text", hence the steps outlined above. Maybe you meant from "I've already clicked 'Reply' and typed my answer", in which case we currently have only three clicks.
If you really find these three clicks unbearable, go look for a Modification package, because (as Arantor has explained much better as I did) you're probably hugely over-estimating the importance that other forum users put on images, which are a side note in most forums.

 

Please see statics above.
Different platforms and target audience maybe .... but how did they get so big...... by making things SO EASY that it's actually intuitive.
   
"If you really find these three clicks unbearable, go look for a Modification package..."
But it's not just that, is it,  It's the re sizing that SO MANY users seem to struggle with.
Of course I could open up the the server to allow any size images but who can afford that kind of server space if they are running SMF?!
( Incidentally, I did do that in the early days, circa 2003,  after uploads of 8Gb of images in the first year SMF broke, crashed the DB and my VPS was blocked until I gave them a lot of money! )
If it's only me crying out for 'One Click uploads', ( or "Simple Image upload" an approved MOD that also broke SMF! ), so be it, as you infer, maybe I've outgrown SMF target demographic....  :(

NB: Incidentally, I'm currently using Chevereto... but after sales support can be .... temperamental!    ::)


 

 

Quote from: Arantor on April 18, 2019, 04:22:25 AM
It might seem like resizing to a max size is probably not a huge feature though it gets complicated when we support GD and multiple connectors for ImageMagick which all have to be done in different ways - and then people will want all the tooling as well to resize all existing attachments to the new setup. Which will naturally need to cope with those unusual sites that have thousands and thousands of files, so it needs to be able to resume where it left off and do it in chunks. Which is no longer 'just add a resize instruction' but probably several days of full time work.

QuotePlease don't take this as criticism of ANYONE associated with the coding of SMF, I think you are doing a sterling job as you are doing it as hobby not a day job, many personal thanks.
SMF has always been a friend to me, especially as it's "free"..... I  just have concerns for it's future.

I'm just trying to be realistic about what that would need to support what you're asking of it - but reiterating that it isn't criticism is somewhat disingenuous, because it is still criticism as 'it doesn't do this thing that I really want it to do', even if it isn't really negative.

Honestly, I get your use case, but I would respectfully suggest that it was never intended as a major feature in SMF the way you're using it. That's not to say SMF can't support your needs but a picture-first forum is not what SMF was designed to do at all; its core was always text optionally supported by pictures - consider even the very fact they're called *attachments*, as attached to something rather than the main feature.

Have you outgrown SMF's target demographic? Possibly - because the original target was posts of text. Does that mean SMF can't support you? Not at all, it just means that unfortunately what you want (and need) probably shouldn't be SMF's most pressing improvements. But that doesn't mean SMF can't be improved to support what you want - it just means it has to be balanced alongside other needs and considerations, and some of those are 'effort of implementation', and nothing can fix that other than time and effort being applied.

It's a lot different if there were a company that could be engaged to support this with financial contributions - I work for an open source company, we normally support open source platforms like Moodle and Mahara, but I will raise the debate to see if we can provide support as crowdfunded developers. The only downside is that if that were a thing, I somehow doubt I'd be able to convince the powers that be to let me do it at less than cost price, so to fund a week's worth of development from one person is something like $4400 USD (excl. taxes). But if there was a serious willingness from the community to engage in that, and accelerate development, I can certainly see if my company can help.

Why do I point this out? Right now, the core dev team is solely volunteers, and that means their paying work in whatever format has to come first. I think it gets complicated if the project itself has to find ways to pay developers, but a third party might be able to make it happen - and if this were viable on some level, imagine what could be done with a week's funded dev time. 40 hours of dev by someone who does PHP all day long, doing nothing else, would be able to achieve quite a lot.

Quote from: ModelBoatMayhem on April 18, 2019, 12:58:48 AM
'The "we" is the 7,000+ members of my Forum.

Is it though?  Have you received a written response from every single individual member of your forum which says that they all want this feature?  If you haven't you cannot claim that 7,000+ members want it because 7,000+ members have not stated that they want it.

Quotev2.1 - Only geeks ( like me ) want to resize photos for uploading!

How do you know?  Have you asked everyone in the whole world?  How do you define a geek?

QuoteEveryone else wants / Expects 'Single Click' photo uploads

Again, how do you know what everyone wants?  Have you asked every single person in the whole world who uses forum software?

You are overgeneralising and making assumptions without having the evidence to support what you are saying.  Any argument that relies on the premise that 'everyone wants x' is patently false because there's no way that the sweeping statement 'everyone wants x' can be supported by evidence.

In my opinion, what you are really saying is 'I want this'.  That's fair enough.  You are entitled to make feature requests and to have your say.  Please just avoid dressing it up as something it is not though by trying to claim that 'everyone wants this' when you cannot possibly claim to know that.

There is plenty of anecdotal evidence over a number of years both here and elsewhere to support the basis that it is *far* more than just ModelBoatMayhem that wants a better user experience (fewer clicks/easier to use) and features like resizing etc. I vehemently dislike that you've reduced the argument from 'all the people on one site' to '1 person wants this' simply because you don't have the evidence at hand to realise it's the case. You really, really didn't need to labour the point, nor counter-argue for a position that is almost as fallacious as the one you claim in the start of your post. I also suspect that no amount of evidence would be sufficient for you either, having seen previous debates.

The reality is vastly more complicated than argument by reduction, and it's a weird day when I'm actually arguing in favour of adding core features to a platform that I've long argued has too many features and choices, so... yeah.

Quote from: ModelBoIyhem on April 18, 2019, 03:55:30 AM

Quote from: Arantor on April 18, 2019, 03:06:55 AM

Also, what does 'one click uploading' even mean? I literally do not understand how to do one click uploading in ANY platform. Every single platform I can think of requires a flat minimum of 2-3 clicks to do anything (yes, that includes Facebook). As for resizing, I'd strongly make that configurable rather than the default, there are plenty of times when I've uploaded large images with the intention of them NOT being resized and been frustrated when platforms do resize them, but those are cases you don't run into like sharing large structure diagrams of systems that have hundreds of tables. Just saying - if we support your use case, we have to support mine too as mine is just as important to me as yours is to you.

 
"what does 'one click uploading' even mean?" - Semantics,  no need to be pedantic.   ::)
 
Yes, resizing, reformatting  & storage options would be a must.
 
..... ah well, dreams and wishes!..... sigh.    :D
 

I also still have no idea what you mean with this. Maybe if you made an attempt to explain, we would.

Resizing however is what I was thinking about in my reply, because just a few users sharing photos of some 4mb each add up to a lot of space very quickly and it's hard to convince them to resize it. Then you also have that they might upload it from their phones where resizing can be even more of a pain to do. There are many situations where resizing can be useful.

Honestly thought, for my particular use case attachment limits per file type would also have worked, but since there is already a system to resize avatars I imagine it would not have to be built from scratch for attachments.

Quote from: Arantor on April 18, 2019, 05:48:26 AM
There is plenty of anecdotal evidence over a number of years both here and elsewhere to support the basis that it is *far* more than just ModelBoIyhem that wants a better user experience (fewer clicks/easier to use) and features like resizing etc. I vehemently dislike that you've reduced the argument from 'all the people on one site' to '1 person wants this' simply because you don't have the evidence at hand to realise it's the case. You really, really didn't need to labour the point, nor counter-argue for a position that is almost as fallacious as the one you claim in the start of your post. I also suspect that no amount of evidence would be sufficient for you either, having seen previous debates.

The reality is vastly more complicated than argument by reduction, and it's a weird day when I'm actually arguing in favour of adding core features to a platform that I've long argued has too many features and choices, so... yeah.

I'm sure that there are many who support that position and would be interested in this feature and I agree that others have made the request here.  You will note that I did not say otherwise and nor did I dismiss the request.  At no stage have I said that it's a bad idea or something that is not desired by users.  I solely take issue with the idea that 'everyone wants'.  In an era where so much misinformation and exaggerated claims are made every day it is very important to be as accurate as possible and making claims about what everyone wants does not help in this regard, so all I am asking is for members here to be more circumspect and/or precise in terms of who they are referring to and what they mean.  To my mind, this is not an unreasonable request.

You misjudge me if you truly believe that evidence does not satisfy me.  Evidence-based argument is an essential component of my job and it is what distinguishes high quality work from mediocre or poor work.  Either way, it's not for me to convince you about what I think or how I think.  There's only one person in this whole community who ever really knew how I thought and what I'm really like.  Still, as Bucks Fizz once sang, now those days are gone.

OK, so let's recap real quick on what was essentially requested.

Users have devices that produce by default enormous pictures. Your average phone will produce a multi-megabyte monster of a picture by default (4MB would be quite small; my phone from 6 years ago routinely produced 8MB plus files based on its 41MP sensor). This has two problems: it makes a huge-ass file that you as a forum owner have to store, and the picture is probably larger than most user's screens, so what's the point in storing it in full anyway?

So if you have a picture that's huge and unwieldy and annoying to work with in its raw format, why not provides options for automatically dealing with it in a more intelligent way - resize it downwards to a reasonable size, reduces space consumption, lets the user view it in a way that makes sense etc. and means that - crucially - the user doesn't have to bother with resizing an image.

I can resize an image with no trouble. I'm sure many people here can too. But many of our users can't. We live in a world where it is not 'odd' for users not to understand the mechanics of things, and when I ask the users of the clients I work for, for a screenshot, several things may or may not happen. I've had users take a screenshot, put it in a Word document. I've had users take a screenshot of their laptop with their phone and send me that. I've even had users screenshot, put it in a Word document, print it out, take a photo with their phone to put it in email. (These sound like urban legends. They absolutely are not.)

These people aren't idiots - we're talking people that are part-way through a multi-year degree programme (in some cases, from very prestigious schools that you don't get to unless you are legitimately capable, and in the case of the printing-it-out-to-take-a-photo, we're talking someone who is actually a college-level teacher). We're talking about people who aren't techie. These are all people who post on forums.

So, resizing down to an acceptable size should be an option provided by default. Fun fact, most of the gallery mods already do this on some level anyway. And there will be times you explicitly don't want it to do that for whatever reason (maybe you're uploading a massive PNG diagram and you'd rather not have it be downsized, or converted to JPEG, so these need to not be without some kinds of controls). Auto conversion to JPEG would be neat but may be awkward.

Limits per file type are a viable option - right up until we run into 'regular users' again. And ModelBoatMayhem is absolutely right: people expect this to be as simple as it is on their phones with the Facebook app and similar. I'd find it hard to provide suitable qualitative or quantitative data to support it but I have more than enough anecdata to support that position, and I know the paid platforms absolutely believe that's a thing, they have definitely made it simpler. You'll end up running into 'but Facebook doesn't make me resize it, it does it for me' - and while I would certainly have some words about entitlement (because why wouldn't I?), that doesn't change the fact that I would actually agree with that.

I don't *think* that the issue of uploading attachments per se is the problem; I think there is a lack of useful post-processing options, and I think the use case of somehow putting pictures in posts is a use case that is not well supported at this time but achievable, moreso in 2.1 than before. I think that it may be feasible to consider some methodology of making it more obvious of how to do it - as there are lots of different use cases for showcasing photos in a non-gallery style context but the options are difficult to balance without necessarily making it worse for a given subset of users.

Quote from: IrisadoYou will note that I did not say otherwise and nor did I dismiss the request.

You didn't in so many words, no, but you *did* reduce it from '7000+' to '1' which in practical terms amounts to the same thing.

Quote from: IrisadoI solely take issue with the idea that 'everyone wants'.

Then perhaps it should have been phrased better because you gave me a strong impression of dismissing the entire suggestion on the basis of 'only 1 person wants this'.

Quote from: IrisadoYou misjudge me if you truly believe that evidence does not satisfy me.  Evidence-based argument is an essential component of my job and it is what distinguishes high quality work from mediocre or poor work.

Perhaps, but this is an essential angle of what we're discussing here - and an essential part of forum life. I don't know much about you, I can only respond to what I see. What I see is arguments that are torn apart by pedantry on rules-lawyering on a scale that even I'm shocked by (and as earlier in this thread, I'm professionally pedantic, it's essential to how I do my job). What I see is things deconstructed by the letter of the rules rather than the spirit.

I see someone who with the slightest provocation jumps in to moderate - further building the impression I have long had of a rules lawyer, someone who does everything by the letter of the law rather than its intent. All of the debates around the EU certainly reinforce that impression - e.g. in the Article 13/15/whatever it's numbered now debate, getting into nitty-gritty about which bodies do what and whose responsible for what... that's not especially relevant to the issue at hand, which was 'what are the consequences of these laws on us as forum owners', with a sideline into 'why these are so damnably flawed' and 'I could see an argument for this being a way to effectively curtail what could otherwise become competition for the established powers'.

So with that bias in mind, to me you've appeared to deconstruct the argument from 'a lot of people want this' to '1 person says a lot of people want this but only 1 person is saying this', which looks like a dismissal of the validity of the request. Yes, the claim is somewhat hyperbolic - anyone who is arguing from a position that can only be objectively described as inferior and not in a position to really influence change will try to make the problem seem more important than it actually is, objectively. And subjectively, it is an important problem for them. I suspect that while 7000+ people might be an exaggeration, it's very likely more than 1 person has actively outright asked for improvements, that many more have asked for help on how to do things, and that it could easily be perceived as that significant an issue.

Quoteso all I am asking is for members here to be more circumspect and/or precise in terms of who they are referring to and what they mean.  To my mind, this is not an unreasonable request.

Unfortunately real life doesn't actually work like that. To me, that reads as if you're arguing that for any given feature, substantive evidence should be required to show that it is valuable, at which point you might as well pack up and go home now, hence my statement about how no level of evidence would actually satisfy you.

Doing such a thing is inherently dangerous with software, especially a platform that is already widely used in very varied ways. The problem is, if you start putting in something akin to 'burdens of proof of interest' for a feature, you then need to hold everything up to that standard. And what constitutes proof is highly subjective. I literally see this daily - there are features in the Moodle tracker that have been there for years, where they use JIRA which lets people vote on things. But guess what - there are issues with no votes that get vastly more developer attention than the ones that have dozens of votes, because that burden of proof of importance isn't rigorously and consistently applied.

Such matters are really better left to a lead developer who can look at the anecdata - because that is all you're going to have, and hopefully from more sources than just here - and make a judgement call based on things. This isn't some place where you can write user stories and have a business owner groom a backlog because there isn't one business owner for SMF. Everyone who's ever run a forum is a business owner - and for every one of those, the requirements are fundamentally and importantly different.

Moodle has exactly the same problem: they implement what they see as important, and don't really listen to what the community says because they also hide it behind burdens of proof. You sit in a room with these people, and literal hundreds of site admins (who have paid to be there, no less) discussing what they'd like to see in the next version. Almost nothing of last year's list made it into the platform, and half of this list's wishlist is actually retrofitting last year's, and some of those were items that were vocally outlined as important by the actual users, the people who use the platform.

Putting it behind burdens of proof also opens it up to rules lawyering, rather than trying to do what's best for the community. I still get the odd complaint about decisions I made for SMF's actual roadmap 5 years ago, done based on the anecdata available to me at the time. If I'd done what you were suggesting and held things to a burden of proof, 2.1 would have about half the features it currently does over 2.0, though it would have fewer support issues right now since if I'd actually done what you were suggesting, there wouldn't be an alerts system in 2.1 at all.

To your point about specificity... I'm pretty certain you have no idea how hard that actually is to do. I do this as part of my day job, where we charge people £1000 per day for this service to go to them, sit with them and work out what they actually want done. We have these sessions booked in *regularly*. It's not even figuring out edge cases, but simply going from the vagueness of what it should vaguely do and turn it into something actionable. And for these people, with money on the line both to figure it out and then to actually pay for it to be done, they have a pretty reasonable amount of incentive to figure this out, and they're engaged and involved in it. Now replicate this process with people who... aren't. People who aren't technical, aren't aware of what's possible, and are fundamentally not *invested* in the same way.

That's the reality of what software development looks like. Then you combine it with a comment that I heard many times around here - 'oh you're just a developer, what do you know' - and you're basically guaranteeing that what gets built doesn't actually meet needs properly because it carries inbuilt presumptions around usefulness and relevance.

Hint: this is why I quit the dev team 5 years ago. I was hopeful that things were better, but I'm beginning to have doubts again how ingrained this sort of mindset is now. Development is actually hard.

Quote from: Arantor on April 18, 2019, 06:51:44 AM
You didn't in so many words, no, but you *did* reduce it from '7000+' to '1' which in practical terms amounts to the same thing.

To you perhaps, but not to me, so for the avoidance of any doubt I reiterate that I am not dismissing the request.

QuotePerhaps, but this is an essential angle of what we're discussing here - and an essential part of forum life. I don't know much about you, I can only respond to what I see. What I see is arguments that are torn apart by pedantry on rules-lawyering on a scale that even I'm shocked by (and as earlier in this thread, I'm professionally pedantic, it's essential to how I do my job). What I see is things deconstructed by the letter of the rules rather than the spirit.

I see someone who with the slightest provocation jumps in to moderate - further building the impression I have long had of a rules lawyer, someone who does everything by the letter of the law rather than its intent. All of the debates around the EU certainly reinforce that impression - e.g. in the Article 13/15/whatever it's numbered now debate, getting into nitty-gritty about which bodies do what and whose responsible for what... that's not especially relevant to the issue at hand, which was 'what are the consequences of these laws on us as forum owners', with a sideline into 'why these are so damnably flawed' and 'I could see an argument for this being a way to effectively curtail what could otherwise become competition for the established powers'.

You're conflating a range of separate issues here.  First, none of that which you have outlined above refers to moderation, rather they are contributions that I have made to topics.  Second, specifically regarding the EU, a small number of other contributors to that discussion (i.e. not you) were making points based on a misunderstanding of how the institutions work and so my comments were entirely valid and relevant on that basis.

QuoteI suspect that while 7000+ people might be an exaggeration, it's very likely more than 1 person has actively outright asked for improvements, that many more have asked for help on how to do things, and that it could easily be perceived as that significant an issue.

I agree.  Indeed, had that been the argument articulated in the first instance in lieu of 'everyone wants', I would not have posted in this topic.

QuoteThen you combine it with a comment that I heard many times around here - 'oh you're just a developer, what do you know'

Funnily enough, this is how I feel, only not in relation to development.

Quote
Users have devices that produce by default enormous pictures. Your average phone will produce a multi-megabyte monster of a picture by default (4MB would be quite small; my phone from 6 years ago routinely produced 8MB plus files based on its 41MP sensor). This has two problems: it makes a huge-ass file that you as a forum owner have to store, and the picture is probably larger than most user's screens, so what's the point in storing it in full anyway?

So if you have a picture that's huge and unwieldy and annoying to work with in its raw format, why not provides options for automatically dealing with it in a more intelligent way - resize it downwards to a reasonable size, reduces space consumption, lets the user view it in a way that makes sense etc. and means that - crucially - the user doesn't have to bother with resizing an image.

I can resize an image with no trouble. I'm sure many people here can too. But many of our users can't. We live in a world where it is not 'odd' for users not to understand the mechanics of things, and when I ask the users of the clients I work for, for a screenshot, several things may or may not happen. I've had users take a screenshot, put it in a Word document. I've had users take a screenshot of their laptop with their phone and send me that. I've even had users screenshot, put it in a Word document, print it out, take a photo with their phone to put it in email. (These sound like urban legends. They absolutely are not.)

These people aren't idiots - we're talking people that are part-way through a multi-year degree programme (in some cases, from very prestigious schools that you don't get to unless you are legitimately capable, and in the case of the printing-it-out-to-take-a-photo, we're talking someone who is actually a college-level teacher). We're talking about people who aren't techie. These are all people who post on forums.

So, resizing down to an acceptable size should be an option provided by default. Fun fact, most of the gallery mods already do this on some level anyway. And there will be times you explicitly don't want it to do that for whatever reason (maybe you're uploading a massive PNG diagram and you'd rather not have it be downsized, or converted to JPEG, so these need to not be without some kinds of controls). Auto conversion to JPEG would be neat but may be awkward.

Limits per file type are a viable option - right up until we run into 'regular users' again. And ModelBoIyhem is absolutely right: people expect this to be as simple as it is on their phones with the Facebook app and similar. I'd find it hard to provide suitable qualitative or quantitative data to support it but I have more than enough anecdata to support that position, and I know the paid platforms absolutely believe that's a thing, they have definitely made it simpler. You'll end up running into 'but Facebook doesn't make me resize it, it does it for me' - and while I would certainly have some words about entitlement (because why wouldn't I?), that doesn't change the fact that I would actually agree with that.

I don't *think* that the issue of uploading attachments per se is the problem; I think there is a lack of useful post-processing options, and I think the use case of somehow putting pictures in posts is a use case that is not well supported at this time but achievable, moreso in 2.1 than before. I think that it may be feasible to consider some methodology of making it more obvious of how to do it - as there are lots of different use cases for showcasing photos in a non-gallery style context but the options are difficult to balance without necessarily making it worse for a given subset of users.

Yep. There also seems to be quite a few communities with a lot of senior users out there, where it might be even more difficult to teach how to do it.

In my userbase it mostly fell on "they know how, but it's easier to just upload what is allowed". I allowed 5mb attachments, so they just used that. They didn't have a problem resizing it before, though they seemed less keen to take on the work and thus used attachments less often.

I think resizing to same-format is preferrable. Many pngs absolutely should not become jpeg, but for photos jpeg saves much more space with no meaningful loss (granted the right compression is used).  I recall this being an option for avatars, but I don't remember if it just turned everything into png or went for the same filetype as the original.

Limits per filetype in my case was meant for things other than images. The only reason I increased the limit was for mp3 files used in some contests, but I can think of similar situations where you want to make a higher limit just for N files. Even with an auto-resizing I can still see it being useful, but it might be more fit for mod material. In the case of resizing you might even want to leave gifs out of the equation and limit them separately, for example.

QuoteI solely take issue with the idea that 'everyone wants'.

QuoteIndeed, had that been the argument articulated in the first instance in lieu of 'everyone wants', I would not have posted in this topic.

I don't think you're wrong on this point, but I think your response to that was more than necessary, even more so because it was likely an exaggeration of speech than a literal "fact" to begin with.

QuoteYou're conflating a range of separate issues here.

To you, perhaps. To me, no, because each interaction with a person must necessarily bias how I perceive what they're writing. I can't entirely separate the contexts of what someone has said before/how they've acted before with what they're saying now. I try to do it, try to take each comment on its own merits and flaws but humanity is hard. So when I see posts reducing down '7000+ people' to '1 person', I can't quite escape what I've seen before and conclude it's the same style of behaviour at work, reducing an argument almost to its literal meaning, not necessarily the spirit of it. That is what I am railing against here. Just as you dislike people being unspecific and not circumspect, I dislike going too far the other way as well and I've seen how this ends in other arguments, which ultimately just annoys everyone and makes the original proponents feel like they're not being listened to. I suspect I've given that impression too, but I'm not doing it on the basis of reducing an argument out of some perception of its flaws.

I would even argue that contribution to a topic can be a form of moderation. A moderator is a position of power, with that comes an expectation that if they lead the discussion in a given direction, that is where the discussion should go. It doesn't require a moderation action to be moderation. Even politely asking a question in an otherwise angry debate can be a subtle form of moderation. Hence my comment about rules-lawyering: you're picking apart what I say on its exact words rather than its spirit.

QuoteI agree.  Indeed, had that been the argument articulated in the first instance in lieu of 'everyone wants', I would not have posted in this topic.

Not everyone is as... articulate... as you might like. Being combative to people who aren't as articulate about things as you might like just annoys the people who try to discern the underlying meaning - you'll notice that I didn't challenge the 'everyone' part because I didn't have to. I was mostly trying to realign expectations between how important the issue is for the original poster and how important it is perceived or expected to be amongst the original intentions of the software and where its general direction tends to go.

But this, to my perspective, is precisely my point: "everyone knew" that the statement of "everyone wants" was inaccurate on some level. Not everyone is as rigorous as you expect or hope for - and unfortunately trying to project your normal standards from your work environment into a venue like this is only going to frustrate people on some level. Not everyone works like you do, not everyone will discourse on the same standards as you expect, and trying to drag people to your level can be pretty insulting.

It was, I thought, generally understood that "everyone wants" is code for "some people want" and the question is not about skewering the absoluteness of "everyone" because that's very easy to do logically. As to having sufficient support and to gauge how many "everyone" might actually be, it would not be difficult to find sufficient anecdata both here and elsewhere, including the other forums.

I would strongly suggest that people try out other forum software - not only to see if it is better/worse, but simply to understand what other people think is important, and to understand what other people value.

My field is a particularly interesting one; there are a couple of dozen or so forum packages, but in the corporate LMS world, there are literally hundreds of offerings. It's important to go see the competition as it were to see what other people do and what drives other people - and I assure you that looking outside rather than inward, it will be trivial to find more anecdata to support this basis. It's almost easier for me to argue (and feel justly righteous about it :P ) in favour of this situation than it ever would to argue against it, especially given the points made by the original poster about expectations looking at social media.

QuoteFunnily enough, this is how I feel, only not in relation to development.

This is also one of the things I dislike. Don't hold back on my account, say exactly what you mean. I'm assuming this is some kind of thinly veiled attempt to snipe at me because I don't actively use SMF and don't actively contribute to its development any more, therefore somehow my opinion is less relevant or important. To which I'd note that it's *exactly* that attitude that drove me away from actively using SMF in the first place. That somehow my opinion is less valuable for a reason. And within some value of fairness, that's even appropriate; my opinion SHOULD be less important than someone who is actively running a busy SMF forum - but by the same token, someone running a busy SMF forum deserves to have their opinion be heard over someone who was only here for part of the journey.

It long irked me that various stages of developer here didn't run forums because it's hard to see the weak spots in things you don't really use. It long irked me that when the developers who were here were running forums, their opinion was somehow less valuable on some kind of weird assumption that they weren't running forums even if they were.

But that's an assumption built on several others, also on the assumption that it's going to be dissected, looking for logical or practical inconsistencies or held up to some higher standard. And to bring it back to the original point: it's very easy to believe the worst in someone if all your interactions with them leave you with bad feeling, and you have a kind of Pygmalion effect going on.

And none of this debate just leads us further and further away from what we were discussing originally. Isn't that a kind of moderation in its own right, to drown out legitimate issues with rules lawyering and unrelated pedantry? It feels like an exercise in arguing in bad faith.

---

Quote
Yep. There also seems to be quite a few communities with a lot of senior users out there, where it might be even more difficult to teach how to do it.

In my userbase it mostly fell on "they know how, but it's easier to just upload what is allowed". I allowed 5mb attachments, so they just used that. They didn't have a problem resizing it before, though they seemed less keen to take on the work and thus used attachments less often.

I think resizing to same-format is preferrable. Many pngs absolutely should not become jpeg, but for photos jpeg saves much more space with no meaningful loss (granted the right compression is used).  I recall this being an option for avatars, but I don't remember if it just turned everything into png or went for the same filetype as the original.

Limits per filetype in my case was meant for things other than images. The only reason I increased the limit was for mp3 files used in some contests, but I can think of similar situations where you want to make a higher limit just for N files. Even with an auto-resizing I can still see it being useful, but it might be more fit for mod material. In the case of resizing you might even want to leave gifs out of the equation and limit them separately, for example.

I did the limits per type in LevGal, but broader than 'png vs jpg', as 'images vs audio vs documents'.

I can also see the convenience factor of the software doing things vs the users having to, and why not, if sanely configured?

Converting to same format is preferable indeed.

Not sure what avatars do, it's been tweaked many times over the years,

Quote from: Arantor on April 18, 2019, 08:28:20 AM
This is also one of the things I dislike. Don't hold back on my account, say exactly what you mean. I'm assuming this is some kind of thinly veiled attempt to snipe at me because I don't actively use SMF and don't actively contribute to its development any more, therefore somehow my opinion is less relevant or important.

Your assumption is, I'm pleased to say, completely wrong :).  The reason why I didn't elaborate is that it has nothing to do with the topic at hand, or indeed SMF software, so I'm just going to leave it at that.

That's unfortunate, I was looking forward to you telling me what you were thinking rather than making a vague passive-aggressive snipe, even if it turns out to not be in my direction.

Quote from: ModelBoatMayhem on April 18, 2019, 04:24:47 AM

Quote from: m4z on April 18, 2019, 03:26:41 AM
I actually haven't used such sites too much in the last 15 years, unless you count Github, bug trackers, mailing lists, and support forums of big corporations, which are mostly glorified text-only mailing-lists with a web UI (and always terrible to use).

That says a Lot!   :o

Does it?
I didn't say I don't use them at all, and I was mainly talking about forums and less about social media sites; the problem with forums (and social media sites to a lesser/less-annoying extent) is that mostly entry-level tech-savvy people dwell there, disregarding most Netiquette rules (like not using existing quote features and forcing excessive colors onto other users) and demanding free tech help, only to then not answer any follow-up questions that might lead to a solution, or to then not accept most of the solutions they're offered because they're unwilling to do any work on their part at all, or to change their behavior that is causing their problems in the first place.
To me, it's hell on earth and a waste of my time.

Quote from: ModelBoatMayhem on April 18, 2019, 12:58:48 AM
Different platforms and target audience maybe .... but how did they get so big...... by making things SO EASY that it's actually intuitive.

Exactly. If you want image uploading, why not go to Instagram? (Wait, how many popular social media sites offer their software as open-source for self-hosting?)

Quote from: ModelBoatMayhem on April 18, 2019, 12:58:48 AM
But it's not just that, is it,  It's the re sizing that SO MANY users seem to struggle with.

Note that I didn't comment at all about the validity of your resizing issue. I think that might be a useful feature (if you use images in forums, which basically I don't, and so I don't even know what SMF currently offers).


(I will now stop feeding and/or being the troll.)

Btw, what is causing the rewrite of (underscores added by me to avoid the issue) "Model_Boat_Mayhem" to "Model_BoI_yhem" in my posts?

Are there many non-tech-savvy people on forums? Yes. Most forums are of interest to people who are not tech savvy.

Are all low tech savvy users just sucking up all the support and so on? I think the answer to that depends a lot on the kinds of communities you frequent, and what sort of imbalance and dynamic is there. Certainly in the places I hang out, this is a very different dynamic.

A lot of forums are not tech support forums, a lot are simply places to hang out, often run by not tech savvy people (after all, one click installation exists), and they just want a place they can call theirs.

Pictures depend a lot on the type and style of community, tech support often features screenshots, enthusiasts of vehicles will often have relevant pics (off-roaders usually have pictures of their vehicles navigating the most ridiculous terrain, vehicle models show off their creations) and I don't think the answer is "just use Instagram" unless you want to push all the conversations there (as happens a lot with Facebook Groups as a forum replacement of sorts)

For the record I see neither of these sets of opinions as trolling, just two narrow subsets of types of forums. Therein lies our challenge, support both of these!

Also to your last point, I assume some odd entry in the word censor maybe?

This thread is typical of what happens when a member suggests a feature request. The developers need a better method of gauging the desirability of such requests rather then falling back on their own limited experiences. This request is very much in-line with how other platforms handle images.

If you need to quantify the desirability of requests made here (which is how it should be) why not have a like/vote system whereby the SMF user community can vote for their favourite suggestions? I've seen too many good suggestions get instantly dismissed or even derided because the developers can see no use for them.

I'd suggest that voting in that matter would end up like it tends to do on xenforo.com.

Quote from: Arantor on April 18, 2019, 12:33:37 PM
I'd suggest that voting in that matter would end up like it tends to do on xenforo.com.

Could you expand on that? I'm a very infrequent visitor there these days. The (likes) system they used in the early days seemed to work quite well.

Only in the very early days did I think it worked - it's long been the case that the likes didn't *really* correlate to what got built. Sure, it's a useful guide, but then again so is skim-reading to see what people are talking about; once upon a time, the original lead dev of SMF read *every topic* and would mark it unread until he was satisfied that it was either out of what he considered scope (having a unified vision that tries to cater to a broad spectrum of uses, without trying to cater to everything) or that it was the user running into something that was a bug that he had to fix. I've long campaigned for the team here to take on a role whereby support or similar collects common requests / common problems that aren't really bugs but frustrations into something actionable.

But I've long thought that K/M/C had a pretty good finger on the pulse about what works in a forum and what feels relevant. I've already expressed the notion that if I ever run a regular forum again, XF is probably my personal choice for anything that isn't super niche with masses of custom dev being needed, and that XF was essentially what I hoped SMF could be the open source competitor to, but I think the ship has sailed for the FOSS forum market to ever truly meaningfully catch up.

Completely non-sequiteur, please tell fixer that Pete says hi, and that I hope TAZ is a slightly less angry place now I'm not arguing with him.

These are the kind of discussions that make me not reply to certain threads...

Image resizing is however one of the last missing functions that is stopping me from moving my 2.0.15 forum to 2.1: missing the ability to have the forum automatically resize image attachments. Not because the members are very 'image-oriented', but because we tend to support our discussions and contributions with image attachments every now and then...

So I do support this request, for now I hope that the Mod author will update this mod to 2.1 RC2 soon...
https://custom.simplemachines.org/mods/index.php?mod=4087

GLWing is still very much around so I would be surprised if it does not get updated soonish, but the licence permits it to be updated without problem by someone else and taken over that way, if that makes sense.

Quote from: Arantor on April 18, 2019, 01:43:40 PM
Completely non-sequiteur, please tell fixer that Pete says hi, and that I hope TAZ is a slightly less angry place now I'm not arguing with him.

I will, TAZ still has its moments!

Yes that mod is excellent and I am very confident it will be upgraded to 2.1 compatibility.


As for the OP...

I shouldn't comment
I shouldn't comment
I shouldn't comment

I'm going to comment ...

Quote from: ModelBoatMayhem on April 18, 2019, 04:24:47 AM
"In 2019, it is estimated that there will be around 2.77 billion social media users around the globe, up from 2.46 billion in 2017. Social network penetration worldwide is ever-increasing. In 2017, 71 percent of internet users were social network users and these figures are expected to grow."

Completely irrelevant.  Forums != 'social media' such as facebook, twitter, Instagram
This has been discussed in a number of threads, each has advantages and disadvantages, but the comparison is unreasonable as an argument.

Quote from: ModelBoatMayhem on April 18, 2019, 04:24:47 AM

Please see statics above.
Different platforms and target audience maybe .... but how did they get so big...... by making things SO EASY that it's actually intuitive.

How did they get so big?  A few reasons

- By generating HUGE amounts of revenue from advertising and selling user data; and investing some of that revenue into paying hiuge teams of developers, coders etc to work full time on such things.  It's not conceivable let alone reasonable to expect a small, entirely volunteer group of people, working on their own time, to compete with that.

- Social media has been (and largely still is) unmoderated and an easy way of people being hateful toward others. In this day and age that seems to be a thing, but on a forum people like that generally get shut down pretty quickly.

- Forums are generally targeted at specific interests. Eg I run a forum for a specific motorbike model. While there is some general chat, the bulk of discussion is around the motorcycle. OTOH 'social media' (really anti-social media) is most often full of shallow rubbish and pictures of people's meals...

Quote from: ModelBoatMayhem on April 18, 2019, 12:58:48 AM
SMF has always been a friend to me, especially as it's "free"

SMF isn't "free", it's FREE.

Quote from: ModelBoIyhem on April 18, 2019, 04:24:47 AM
"In 2019, it is estimated that there will be around 2.77 billion social media users around the globe, up from 2.46 billion in 2017. Social network penetration worldwide is ever-increasing. In 2017, 71 percent of internet users were social network users and these figures are expected to grow."

And yet people still visit forums when they need real advice ::).

OMG.... ModelBoadMayhem made the best point ever when writing:
>NB: Incidentally, I'm currently using Chevereto... but after sales support can be .... temperamental!<

See? He/she said after sales support..."

Nothing else to be said. I am so grateful to you guys doing that! I am using Tinyportal also and already found two bugs.... but I am far from complaining!
Keep on coding! In my life I would not be able to do that!

THANKS
Michael

I run 3 smf forums since 2007, and the main reason people are leaving to other platforms/social networks is the horrible upload system.
People want to upload a bunch of pictures by selecting them on their phone, don't think about resizing and rotation, and be able to add comments to each photo and place it anywhere in the post in a wysiwyg manner. And to see upload progress as well.
When pictures are added in the upload queue, they start to upload immediately, and each successfully uploaded item appear in a kin of mini-gallery, where you can pick it and drag to your message in a form of thumbnail, or click it to insert to the last position of cursor in the message (for mobile users).

Quote from: varsdf on September 24, 2019, 08:55:46 PM
I run 3 smf forums since 2007, and the main reason people are leaving to other platforms/social networks is the horrible upload system.
People want to upload a bunch of pictures by selecting them on their phone, don't think about resizing and rotation, and be able to add comments to each photo and place it anywhere in the post in a wysiwyg manner. And to see upload progress as well.
When pictures are added in the upload queue, they start to upload immediately, and each successfully uploaded item appear in a kin of mini-gallery, where you can pick it and drag to your message in a form of thumbnail, or click it to insert to the last position of cursor in the message (for mobile users).

and how exactly, would you upload the image before submitting the post?
I mean you can attach an image and then preview it before posting.....but just like social media, if you don't actually submit the post then the image is not uploaded.....

as stated before, forums are not social medias.... it's not an instantaneous self gratification software.....

forum
[ˈfôrəm]
NOUN
forums (plural noun) · fora (plural noun)
a place, meeting, or medium where ideas and views on a particular issue can be exchanged.
"it will be a forum for consumers to exchange their views on medical research"
synonyms:
meeting · assembly · gathering · conference · seminar · convention · colloquy · convocation · congress · rally · council · symposium · conclave · congregation · synod · diet · caucus · get-together · colloquium · setting · place · scene · context · stage · framework · backdrop · medium · means · agency · channel · avenue · vehicle · mechanism · apparatus · auspices

a website or web page where users can post comments about a particular issue or topic and reply to other users' postings.

a court or tribunal.
synonyms:
court of law · law court · bench · bar · court of justice · judicature · tribunal · chancery · assizes · courtroom · palais de justice
(in an ancient Roman city) a public square or marketplace used for judicial and other business.
synonyms:
public meeting place · public square · marketplace · agora

not to be a smartass but..... ^

social media
[ˌsōSHəl ˈmēdēə]
NOUN
social medias (plural noun)
websites and applications that enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking.


I'm not saying that the posters request is a bad idea, but keeping in mind that this is a forum software, not a social media software..... so they do function differently

and as mentioned, it is something that they team could consider, but obviously not for 2.1 as it's already in rc versions and pretty much long past the time to be adding completely new features..... that would be something for later releases......


lmfao people leaving forums.... i've been on the internet since before it was really the internet..... and forums aren't going anywhere

again social media and forums are two vastly different things
and typically social media is a free-for-all with little to no supervision
where as typically forums are moderated and are usually about a niche and not a general forum

i mean trying to compare a forum to a social media is about like trying to compare a horse to a car....sure they both may get you where you want to go but they are two completely different things.

To be honest, it's totally doable to upload before posting. I did it in a gallery mod, but the mentality is quite straightforward: the forum core is for talking to each other and images are very much separate - and when SMF 2.0 came out, there weren't the options there are now for uploading (and, for the record, Facebook in 2010 or so wasn't great either)

The problem is that pictures, even now, on a forum are not so typical. The experience of doing a photo heavy setup on a forum is poor, for sure, because a forum is not a gallery. For occasional attachments, SMF is ok but not great, is better in the next version.