Originally Posted by
cblaisd
Given the too-often-sclerotic nature of the FT server, I'd hate to see anything that potentially slows it down.
Unless the image is hosted by flyertalk, then IMG code has no more impact on the performance of IB's FT servers than a regular old URL. The performance of the server that's hosting the image is the issue.
Originally Posted by
GUWonder
Along with bandwidth/handling issues I can see this leading to other problems too, including things like some images being misappropriated and distributed despite not falling within a legal fair use doctrine; images being used as part of debates or for purposes of provocation; inappropriate images being put up by fly-by-night trolls; and so on.
That's easy. Make the penalties for misuse of images severe. At one IBB I pop in on occasionally, leeching an image off of someone else's server (ie, not a dedicated image host or the user's personal webspace) is a suspendable offense (7 days) on the first occurrence. No warnings, because it's very clearly stated in the sites rules/TOS. 2nd occurrence results in a ban. It doesn't take too many blows to the head to get the message across.
The situations you're referring to (debate, inappropriate images, trolling) are more likely to be problematic in OMNI, and the motion calls for no images in OMNI Fluffy or OMNI PR. Further, if a mod ships a thread off to OMNI because it's gone downhill, the images will disappear (you can still use the IMG tag, but vBulletin will either not render it at all, or just render the URL in plaintext).
Here's me using an IMG tag that points nowhere:
Looks like vB just renders the IMG tag as a clickable link.