Cholula

I don't think that the images allowed in Trip Reports and Travel Photography were considered an official test of any sort.

However the experience there will certainly add to the data that our current tests, if approved, provides.

Images were requested in both of those forums due to the special nature of each forum. But there was no thought or discussion, such as we have here and elsewhere, to rolling out images to the rest of FT's forums.

Now we have a proposal for a test of images in our more traditional hotel and airline forums as well as Luxury Hotels and CommunityBuzz. These forums, if approved for images, will be closely watched and monitored over the next few months.

Speaking unofficially for TB, some of the things I'll be looking at are:

• The speed at which images load under various conditions and with different operating systems and internet connection methods.
• Member acceptance and reaction, pro and con, to the inclusion of images in the threads.
• The types and frequency of images posted in the threads.
• The degree of "abuse", both internally and externally, that we see . And by this I mean are we going to see a lot of huge 3 MB images from members and/or an increase in spammers posting their garbage in FT.
• At the end of the day, does the inclusion of images in FT's forums make FT a better place to the majority of it's members.

And I'd suggest a separate feedback thread here and perhaps also in the test forums for specific member discussion and commentary.

The thread we are currently posting to is conjecture on what may or may not happen with images. I'd like to a separate discussion on what actually occurs.

bdjohns1

Agreed that we probably don't really need pictures enabled on OMNI. It would probably get overrun with lolcats and other internet image cliches. I disagree about limiting it to the *Buzz (general) forums only - there's a lot of value in sharing airline-specific images. Another example - over in the car rental forums, some of us are doing "Ride Reports" in order to share what cars are/aren't worth driving. Pictures could help here.

I disagree on the 10KB size limitation though. I like the idea, but I think it's restrictive to force that, plus it's difficult to tell whether an image is 9KB or 11KB without viewing the properties (and because we're not going to be hosting the images on FT, there's no way for vB to enforce this). A dimensions limitation would be more appropriate, and easy to visually enforce. I'm biased towards larger images (max dimension 800 px), but I would be willing to compromise down to the "medium" size on Flickr, which is 500px in the largest dimension:

Like this

To your first point - IB can make the default behavior be "images off" for guests if they want to.

To your second point - we've already got a forum on the front page to discuss the technical details of travel photography. See that little place called the "Travel Photography" forum? However, if I've got photos specific to a given airline, hotel, etc, it's more value-added for the patrons of that brand that want to see photos to be able to view them in the appropriate forum. If we were to go with your "single forum" for putting all images, it would either be a dogpile of unorganized stuff, or a mod's nightmare to keep it organized and friendly to browse.

As I noted in the previous discussion thread, there's a simple technical solution to part of your 4th point (image spamming) - vB has the capability to restrict the use of certain BBCode tags based on postcounts. Tivocommunity's forums don't allow you to use the URL tag until you've had 5 posts.

To the other part of your fourth point (image size), the TB should separately consider supplementing the ToS to define what is "acceptable" in terms of image dimensions/file size. There's no good reason to in-line a 3MB image, so it's as simple as RBPing just like any other inappropriate content. Those who can't post images according to the rules would quickly find their posting privileges suspended/revoked, just like if they were to make personal attacks, spam, or do anything else contrary to the ToS.

serfty

That image is 109Kbytes and proves my point.

(Nice one BTW ^)

On 56K dial-up would take ~30 seconds to load - have one per post up to 20 posts per page and that's a full 10 minutes to simply load a page.

Another issue is that some have limitations with their ISP's (e.g. Maximum/excess up/downloads) and a series of such large web pages would very quickly chew this up.

As already pointed out, one does not always know how much content a page may have nor whether a page is going to have 100k, 1M, 2M or 10M when clicking on it's link.

Another option with vB is "Attachments" where file size can be limited by file type and total sum of the size of all attachments "owned" by the poster.

Punki

Many thanks to all of you for your most excellent suggestions and ideas regarding image size, defaults, etc.

If this test is instituted, and I hope it will be, it will give us a great opportunity to see how enabling photos, and all of your ideas, will work toward making FlyerTalk even better and more interesting place for those who choose to view the photos.

MikeMpls

Please don't allow general use of pictures in FT forums and especially not in Community Buzz.

Community Buzz is a forum we often have to check "on the run" at FT DO's with connections of varying quality. The in-line insertion of images on a bad connection may seriously degrade access to needed info at a critical moment for traveling FlyerTalkers.

And yes, I am writing this from an internet cafe in Hobart, Tasmania ....

People who want to provide access to their photos can do so by uploading their photos to existing sites (I use PhotoBucket) and providing links to the photos that FT users can click on voluntarily.

Cholula

As both a TB member and a moderator of CBuzz!, I'm OK with allowing a test of images in CommunityBuzz to measure the reaction and effect.

We expect to be running a comment thread on images in CBuzz! during the test and we hope you will post your actual results while accessing this forum when images are activated.

RichMSN

Mike, I don't know if you've read the whole thread, but images can be turned on or off by user -- so you can get links and I can get embedded photos. There are some who think we shouldn't have this choice, but frankly, I see this as a no brainer as personally I find it annoying (and it breaks up my reading of a thread) to have to go away, look at a picture, come back to the thread, etc.

lin821

RichMSN, I am not sure if you've read the whole thread . But for anyone browsing the forum as a guest, the feature cannot be turned off under current system default. We haven't heard any confirmation from IB if they will change the system default to image-off during the test phase.

If the default behavior for guest will change to image-off, I assume the photos in Travel Photography and Trip Reports Fora won't automatically load themselves during the test phase either.

bdjohns1

It'd be interesting to see what % of FTers are connecting regularly via 56K-type connections.

It'd also be interesting to see what percentage of FT threads end up with a lot of photos in them. It's pretty obvious when you look at thread titles in the Travel Photography forum that the "View from my hotel room" or "Why I love flying, in an image" threads are going to have a metric ton of photos.

One suggestion that I've seen on other IBBs is that the OP for a thread should include in the thread title a heads-up that the thread is image intensive. So, you might have a thread title like "Little Annoyances in my hotel room [56K beware]". Of course, the same IBB, in their FAQs discourages the use of "56K" tags in thread titles suggesting that members leave the Dark Ages. (said IBB is a little on the in-your-face side, admittedly).

My gut tells me that IB would be hesitant to enable the "attachments" functionality for a couple of reasons:

1) Performance - one of the common complaints now is that page loads sans images are already too slow. Attachments by their nature are hosted on FT's servers.
2) Liability - I'm sure someone with actual legal training like PTravel can explain better, but as I understand, there's less liability for FT if one of the users simply links to material they're not allowed to (copyrighted, etc) - if I'm remembering right, the liability resides with the poster. However, if it's uploaded and hosted on an FT server, there's a liability on the part of IB that has to be considered.

kokonutz

That'd work if the OP posts a photo, but not if a subsequent poster does...

RichMSN

I really don't care about guest logins. Why should any member?

I login every time I look at FT and so should other members (if I'm on a shared computer, I simply don't check the box that remembers the login).

chrissxb

technically, a mod could add [photo] to a thread title

but I don't expect to have >20 photos in each thread ... one here ... one there but I can't image to have tons of photos all of a sudden ...

kokonutz

That's my hypothesis, too. I guess the test will either prove us right or wrong (assuming it passes).

MikeMpls

Not every one logs in every time, especially not at public computers. I don't mind linking to pictures one bit. Overall, I'm just underwhelmed about pictures in FT.

f0zzyNUE

hi,

i would very much appreciate the possibility to include images in any kind of FT forum. ^
for those users who are afraid about increased loading time - you can either switch off "show images" in your profile - or just use mobile.flyertalk.com which is the FT edition for mobile devices. you can also retrieve it in a rich client browser and the mobile/wireless edition is optimized to serve devices with low internet bandwidth (you will only see *external image* wherever an image is inserted).

just my 2ct.
CHris