With regards to the photo posting, is there such a thing that the webmaster could install that self adjusts the photo to the correct size as its be loaded onto the forum page?.
Dan, that's something to look into, I'll get back to you on that!
Dan, here is the answer from our forum administrator;
Rob is there anything in the forums hosting board that has an automatic picture sizing that can be added to the photo attachment upload?
in a word, no. ALR links to a 3rd party image archive that's similar to imgur. this means that images that are in ALR forum threads are not stored on the ALR forum server, and if that 3rd party archive server goes belly up, or pulls a fast one as pukebucket did, all the ALR posted images from that 3rd party source are gone. not a good thing, and imho this is not the way to go.
the problem with using attached post images, that are stored on the TMA server, is that most of these images are mega large. for the most part we can blame that on cellphones and digital cameras, where the idea is that large images are needed to make prints. i doubt that even .1% of users are interested in hard copy images.
so you have a 4000 wide image that runs 8megs or so to upload as an attachment and what might happen is the the upload will browser time out because of YOUR poor bandwidth connection. no one wants to edit their images, or cares to, or knows how to create more meaningful digital dimensions. 1024 (hex) width is really quite large enuf, and most would be better off with 800 pixels wide. the other issue with large uploaded images is that they eat up server space.