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.
