Picture hosting consideration

[praetor3d]

I wanted to ask if there could be consideration for having RA hosting relevant artwork/pictures?
It would be nice to have it hosted on RA, rather than being at the mercy of external hosting sites that could delete content at any moment.

But instead of having a random non-sensical free-for-all style posting that could blow up storage requirements... I'm asking if there could be an allowance for illustrating stories, and just keeping it in the story section so that it could be somewhat easily moderated? I'd also volunteer to mod pics if needed.

I've seen on other sites, sizing rules that make logistical sense, like animated GIFs no larger than 2 MB, or no more than 4 JPGS with max 500K size, and limiting to a post and/or a day.
Given that there seems to be an average of 3 to 5 story posts a day, would this be doable?

[Vela Nanashi]

Currently that would be a hard ask to host images, we have both limited storage and limited bandwidth so as it is right now it would be way too expensive to host images here. Even if we forced them to be tiny. I would love it if we could. I know kb and ru briefly tried to offer that and stopped when that blew up in size and bandwidth cost.

[RapeU]

It would indeed be too expensive to host images on here. Sorry.

[Claire]

@praetor3d It's nice to see you here again, has been a while.

@RapeU and @Vela Nanashi: There is a potential solution. Currently, attachments to posts are generally disabled. If you allow attachments, you can then change the permissions for who can make use of them for different user groups. So you could create a user group called "Picture Story Authors" or "Visual Artists" or something like that. And then you change the permission settings as follows:

• Registered Users: Can't attach files
• Picture Story Author: Can attach files

I think you could even limit that to specific boards so that a user can only attach files to posts in the story boards for example.

So what you would do is this: Attachments are in general forbidden. Only authors/artists who want to post stories/art that is necessary for the story to make sense are allowed to attach files after they requested permission to do so and you granted it. I would regulate it like this:

Images that are purely illustrative and don't affect readability of the story even if the image host takes them down must be hosted elsewhere. @HistBuff's story here would be an example of that. But in case of a story like @praetor3d's story here where the story becomes illegible without the images, you could give special permission to the author to upload the images directly to the forum.

That would limit the bandwidth used by images drastically. Unless you suddenly get a flood of authors who essentially want to post comics instead of classical stories, I doubt that hosting the occasional image story directly on the forum would generate much more traffic than the avatars do already.

[praetor3d]

It would indeed be too expensive to host images on here. Sorry.

Yeah, I've seen the costs backfire on other sites...
I was hoping that if image posting were limited in quantity and limited to just being relevant to the story section, that it would be low.
Thanks for the consideration

[RapeU]

It would indeed be too expensive to host images on here. Sorry.

Yeah, I've seen the costs backfire on other sites...
I was hoping that if image posting were limited in quantity and limited to just being relevant to the story section, that it would be low.
Thanks for the consideration

With @Claire's potential solution, I would be open to attachments at some point in the future, preferably when the forum is more active and not in the current state of being on life support.