Reporting 2 site problems

[Jeff22]

There is a very serious error in how this site works. If a user goes to edit their Reply by clicking UPDATE THIS, it unchecks the box near the bottom that says Enable email notification of this thread.
Somebody really should tell 'Tom' about this deal so he can have his IT staff fix it. ;-)
Well it didn't unchecked that box on this one but it did it repeatedly on one that I was working on earlier that hadn't been discussed by anyone in a few years. It was at http://www.tomsguide.com/forum/242954-49-spinrite-invalid-opcode
But also, why doesn't that PICTURE icon let me upload an image? It wants it to be hosted somewhere else? That's too much work for your average Joe.

 

[ssddx]

tomshardware and tomsguide have never had image hosting capability and i am not aware of any plans to move towards hosting images locally on the site via an upload button. we have always had forum images hosted externally. as far as why, i can only guess but likely to save server space given our quite substantial forum traffic. if we started hosting images it could get out of hand rather quick.

its quite simple to post pictures here. tinypic, imgur, postimage, photobucket, google images among others allow you to host very easily. most even provide a BBcode snippet you can paste into your threads [no need to use the image icon] or if you prefer they give you a direct link you can post into the image icons popup window. believe me - any average joe can learn how to do that quite easily.

i'm not sure that i would call the email notification checkbox a serious issue but our community staffer titillating regularly checks this section so will see it and be made aware that you think its a bug.

also, i'll let you know this now.. replying to a dead thread that is several years old is often called necro posting and generally is not something that you should be doing [normally we delete the replies and close the threads]. if you have a similar question please start your own thread.

 

[Titillating]

I think ssddx provided a really good explanation here. We don't host the images ourselves because it would simply be too much to maintain. With the plethora of free image hosting services out there, it just doesn't make sense for us to host it ourselves. I'd hardly consider that to be "too much work", and I'd imagine that your average Joe would be much more comfortable using something like imgur, rather than trying to figure out any proprietary image hosting service we whip up.

As for the email notification check box, I don't know what to tell you there. It's not a bug, it is a conscious design choice - although the question of who made that choice is not something I know. In either case, it really shouldn't be a huge issue, just one extra mouse click. I think there will be people who will be unhappy about it whether we change that or not, but I'll make a note of this. If there is enough of a demand to see this changed, then we'll see what we can do about it