Chip said:
If nothing else, over-use of pointless images is a waste of bandwidth and page space. While nearly everybody has broadband at home these days, some of us also like to check the forums from our phones as well. I don't particularly enjoy having to wait while several hundred K of unnecessary images load up every time I open a thread - and I know I'm not the only one.
If this were a real issue the forum would be set to auto-link all inline images. What client waits for all images to load before displaying the webpage? Certainly not mine. I agree with your central point (in general, although in this particular case DCGM was making a joke, which you have now ruined) but you are clutching at straws here.
That paragraph was just me stating my feelings on the whole unnecessary images topic. It had nothing to do with why I changed DCGM's image to a link.
When I got promoted to moderator a few days ago I figured I should actually read the board rules that I'm supposed to enforce. I know they're more like guidelines that rules (especially in Off Topic), but they're pretty clear about large images unrelated to the subject of the thread, as well as offensive content. I weighed that along with the fact that the post contained no meaningful points supporting the use of the image, points which may have shifted the tone of the post to something a little less rough. Then, instead of simply deleting the post or changing the link to something a little more friendly, I changed the image to a link that pointed out both that the picture contained profanity and was sort-of relavent to the discussion (insofar as it made the poster's feelings on the subject very clear). Those who don't want to bother with it can now avoid it, and those that are interested are only one click away from comedy bronze.
I didn't just take one look at the post and edit it because I could. I'm trying to take this whole moderator thing seriously. If everybody thinks I'm way out of line, then maybe I need to look at these things differently. Maybe it will take me a while to find the right balance, but I still think I made the right call here.
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Also, I hope you're using the lo-fi version of the forums, because this page alone is 900 KB of images, HTML, CSS and javascript. DCGM's image macro is 40 KB. PlopperZ's avatar is 650 KB!
I use lo-fi as much as I can, but you cannot post replies in lo-fi mode. Lo-fi also doesn't track what posts you have and haven't viewed, so you have to keep a mental log of post counts for popular threads to know if there are new posts or not.
