Image Handling Options in 2.1

[Irisado]

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.

[Arantor]

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.

You 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.

I 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'.

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.

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.

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.

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.

[Irisado]

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.

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'.

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.

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.

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.

Then 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.

[Gwenwyfar]

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.

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

Indeed, 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.

[Arantor]

You'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.

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.

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 ) 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.

Funnily 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.

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,

[Irisado]

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.

[Arantor]

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.

[m4z]

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!   

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.

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?)

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?

[Arantor]

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?

[zappaDPJ]

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.

[Arantor]

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

[zappaDPJ]

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.

[Arantor]

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.

[@rjen]

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

[Arantor]

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.

[zappaDPJ]

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!

[landyvlad]

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 ...

"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.

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...

SMF has always been a friend to me, especially as it's "free"

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

[GigaWatt]

"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 .

[Wichtlmex]

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

[varsdf]

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).