Allow sharing of images, videos, and galleries straight from your computer, instead of posting a link; See edit history of posts

SFF Watercooled

Master of Cramming
Original poster
Sep 26, 2020
398
172
Right now, every time I want to upload images, videos, galleries I have to go to imgur.com to post it there. However, it takes time and sometimes Imgur has problems. It would be a lot easier if you could just post your files directly into the forums to eliminate the hassle.

I would also like to see the edit history of my posts because I know what I put before and what people were quoting my posts about. It would be a nice addition to the forums, although not very necessary. I think moderators should see the revision history of every post to make life easier for them.
 
Last edited:

tinyitx

Shrink Ray Wielder
Jan 25, 2018
2,279
2,338
Regarding uploading images directly, I did ask this question some time ago.

IIRC, if everyone uploads images, then server capacity has to be bigger and this imposes additional cost.
So, only 'supporters' (not sure about the class needed though...gold, silver or bronze) can upload images directly while we 'ordinary' forum members cannot. This sounds fair enough. I think, this forum still does not have enough traffic to generate advertisement income enough to cover the cost to allow everyone to upload images directly.
 

PlayfulPhoenix

Founder of SFF.N
SFFLAB
Chimera Industries
Gold Supporter
Feb 22, 2015
1,052
1,990
@tinyitx's summary is pretty spot on here - while it would be convenient for us to allow everyone to upload media onto SFF.N, the challenge is that when we provide that ability, we're committing to storing and serving those uploads for the lifetime of SFF.N. Furthermore, we can't really anticipate how much folks will want to upload to SFF.N, when given the ability - presumably even more than they'd put on Imgur or elsewhere otherwise. So if that was something anyone could do for free, we'd be committing to a perpetual cost that we couldn't really estimate. This is rather risky for us to take on.

SFF.N does run an image proxy - that is, we make copies of linked media files and host them locally for our most-visited posts/threads in order to improve performance - so we actually have some data with respect to the footprint and bandwidth demands that this content generates. It's a lot - gigabytes of new data each month, translating into terabytes of bandwidth usage. We like our photos here!

The compromise solution we've settled on to date is to allow supporters to upload media directly, because they're covering the cost of that benefit through their contributions. Right now, that is a Silver subscription benefit, but perhaps in the future that is something that could be brought down (at least in part) to Bronze supporters - we have planned enhancements and changes to our supporter subscriptions on top of the ones we've already rolled out in the past 12-18 months.

As for viewing post history - we have that capability enabled for staff and moderator accounts, but providing some form of it more consistently to users is an interesting idea, though I would bet folks would disagree on whether it's better to have it or not. I would say that our current implementation is really geared towards moderation duties, so if we were to introduce that sort of functionality we would want it to be a better experience that's more parseable to end users.
 

aromachi

Cable-Tie Ninja
Dec 18, 2019
150
137
Right now, every time I want to upload images, videos, galleries I have to go to imgur.com to post it there. However, it takes time and sometimes Imgur has problems. It would be a lot easier if you could just post your files directly into the forums to eliminate the hassle.

I would also like to see the edit history of my posts because I know what I put before and what people were quoting my posts about. It would be a nice addition to the forums, although not very necessary. I think moderators should see the revision history of every post to make life easier for them.

Mediafire works really well too, and is what I use for sharing pictures on several forums. Drag and drop uploading is super nice. Click on the picture you want to share, then right click, "copy image URL", paste into SFF.Net. Wam Bam.