Folks;
I have been stewing over this for awhile and spending hours fixing these issues as they pop up. This is an unpaid job and consumes large blocks of time. This new guideline for photo posting will save the editorial staff time and will save low bandwidth users even more time. Right now, I have decided to implement this change. DanB may reverse my decision but until then here it is:
There has been a lot of posting here lately where folks post huge photos. Editors have been making them into links, removing them and trying to educate users on why it is not nice to do this.
The problem has gotten to epidemic proportions.
From today forward Any single photo posted in a story over about 100 KiloBytes in size will be stripped manually, continuing abuse will cause the story to be eliminated. No making it a link, no friendly reminders it will just be removed. Comments posted with large files attached will just be deleted, same thing for bypassing width attribute tags.
We have tried and tried to patiently educate folks but either some of you are too dumb, too lazy, don't care or are too stubborn to take the time to resize your photos so low bandwidth users can read the story without waiting an hour for photos to download.
No excuses. If you are unable to create decent size photos then learn how to create a link to the file and include that rather than the file.
None of this is hard at all and we still want to see your photos but there is absolutely no reason for you to post any photo much over 50 KiloBytes here. That is sufficient size to show enough detail. And for you Windows users the standard ".bmp" file type it creates is a very bad choice because it creates the worlds biggest files with the least information in them.
However, high quality, informative postings with a lot of photos will remain.
For the good of all.
Editor.