All the images in Simple Machines Forum are useless.

[akyahoo]

  All the images in Simple Machines Forum are useless, except emotions. They occupy the bandwidth, eat up data tansfer, and slow down speed greatly. XHTML and CSS can replace images totally.

  Images can hardly be compress by Gzip. Most the images in Simple Machines Forum are about 1KB or 2KB. However, each Web pages have several images. If a Web page has 4 images and 20000 views. It will use:

2KB * 4 * 20000 View = 160 MB

If search engines index the Web page, and millions of visitors click it, the result will be much more terrible. Besides, a forum mostly has thousands of Web pages.

I think stability and speed are much important than feature and appearance.

Can Simple Machines Forum develop another edition, which do not contain images?

[Antechinus]

If you don't want them, remove them. Or use the wap skin. That is the fastest loading thing out there. Or disable images in your browser.
And I must admit I find it funny that you think smileys are the only useful images.

[Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen]

And I must admit I find it funny that you think smileys are the only useful images.

+1. I've seen comments totally opposite, but never this way around

[H]

Images can hardly be compress by Gzip

JPG/PNG/GIF are all lossy image formats and so are already compressed.

If a Web page has 4 images and 20000 views.....

The images only have to be downloaded by each computer once and then they're cached. Considering bandwidth is about $0.10/GB I really don't think a few images will be breaking the bank.

If you want it is easy to modify the theme to remove images. You can also find some lighter themes on the theme site