freeflubber,
Glad to hear you love the site. Its a result of a lot of hard work and passion for our Mustang hobby from all of our moderators and of course, members like yourself, who really make this site what it is.
The reason we have a policy against posting direct images within the thread is because of the negative performance impact it would have on page load times for those members using dial-up modems. Believe it or not, dial-up modems are still being used in high numbers around the world and having pictures loading directly within the threads, can cause response time issues for dialup members viewing the site.
While one or two pictures (depending on size and resolution) may not cause a significant problem, its when multiple pictures are posted within a single thread, page loading problems really begin to appear for dial up users. If this was a server based performance issue, we would simply upgrade our servers but it is not. This is a result of slow transfer speeds through dial-up modems and the only way to ensure reasonable response times for members and guests on dial-up is to keep our site pages as efficient as possible.
We recognize some other sites permit the direct posting of pictures within threads, and in some cases unlimited posting, we decided instead to implement a free members photo gallery and restrict the forums to picture uploads and image links to help improve site response times, particularly for dial-up users.
For other members, including myself using a high speed connection, this policy may seem a little restrictive or inconvenient but please consider the huge difference it makes to our fellow mustang enthusiasts, who are still using dial-up.
Hope our rationale and reasoning makes sense to yourself and our other members. The goal here is to make this site as informative and enjoyable for all mustang enthusiasts, including those stuck with dial-up access.
Please post a reply if you can. Would love to hear your comments, as well as from other members on this issue as well.
