Recently @tiwane mentioned in a few photo-heavy threads that this Discourse forum has limited upload capacity. A lot of the time, people are re-uploading photos which are already on iNat in order to be able to discuss them here. While it’s theoretically possible to copy the image URL from iNat and paste it into the forum to embed it rather than re-upload it, this is an additional step which might be difficult for some users (e.g. on mobile devices).
The forum seems to have “onebox” (link preview) support disabled. Enabling it, even only for inaturalist domains, would turn links to observations on a line by themselves, e.g.
While not quite as pretty as a full-size photo (perhaps it’s possible to configure the styling to be better optimised for photos?), it’d be an easy solution to let people share and discuss iNat observations on the forum without taking up any additional storage space.
This seems worth considering to me - no immediate downsides come to mind other than that it might encourage link posting that is trying to get IDs for observations. But as long as this doesn’t cause a major change in forum behavior, it’s probably not a huge issue.
I agree it could be a solution to people posting a bunch of pictures in some of these threads, since I don’t think Discourse allows limits on the number of photos per post.
I truly detest oneboxes, and I would hate seeing them all over the place whenever someone shares a link. It’s possible to block certain domains from being oneboxed, so they can be limited, but most people are posting iNat links so it wouldn’t take care of the vast majority of links. Maybe I’m just a grouchy old man about them, though.
Or, we could choose to not support discussions that are just about sharing photos, since they’re not particularly constructive discussions. Also, they seem to have died down in activity lately. Maybe due to northern hemisphere spring and people having more time to be outside?
To this end, I just attempted to delete the following photo-heavy threads which I originated but unfortunately although a small trashcan appears it tells me “you do not have permission to delete this topic”.
I’ve tried to use the iNaturalist image URL + HTML <img src="..."> to post an image in the forum without uploading it here, but Discourse always automatically edits my post to add a direct upload to the forum anyway.
Otherwise could you restrict the size of the photo in the Forum?
I don’t need to scroll down 2 screens to see each photo - a third or a quarter of the size so it at least fits on one screen - is plenty (but that is a website /laptop issue - on cellphones it wouldn’t bother readers). We can always go to the obs for more detail.
