Dear dev team:
I was wondering if you had ever planned to make images uploadable to the forum without any kind of drag or drop or external links.. just a button to open a file prompt etc to upload to the forum.. as well as a visual preview and the ability to position the image in the post.
Allow me to explain why this is so important from a forum administration / useability perspective..
I'm in charge of a phpbb forum that is 14 years old. It is still the #1 forum on it's topic, and we have a massive amount of content. Because phpbb has historically been difficult to upload images to, a lot of people hosted their images on external services like photobucket. A majority of these services decided to become unfree and cut their free users off, therefore a lot of our content has vanished over time, hurting our value as a resource very dearly.
The phpbb devs didn't accept my proposal to add a feature to disallow external uploads, loosen up restrictions on uploads, nor my code to recompress submitted images in all formats.. so i developed an image recompressor that runs on a cronjob and also patch their code to remove as many restrictions as possible.
Another problem we have with phpbb is that our users have to be trained to do image uploads, and the process is still clunky. Newer users are used to easily functionality on social media sites. We have a facebook companion group to our forum and it is sadly more popular.. image uploads/ease of use were stated as a main reason why over 4 polls we ran..
Why i love flarum but still haven't adopted it
Flarum has a beautiful interface, a great team, and a lot of promise.. but the image uploads are significantly more clunky than phpbb and a way to upload images to the server is not apparent. This will result in more external image uploads from our users and we will lose content again. This is a massive dealbreaker for us.
Vanilla Forums handles these issues very well with their wysiwyg editor, which is pretty mature at this point. However, vanilla forums has a few roadblocks to adoption for us.. i have experienced odd bugs.. see a lot of sloppy work in the codebase.. and they do not have as good of a team.
Thus we have been waiting to hop off the PhpBB train since, well, 2015..
My proposition and offer of help
If the team decides this is important as we see it and comes up with a plan to implement, I'd be happy to pool together a large one time donation, and maybe even commit to a monthly one afterwards.
I would also be willing to donate my bit of code that manages resizing, recompressing, and broken file extension correction, however the code currently relies on an installed binary of gifsicle, pngcrush, and mozjpeg.. i could modify this to use Imagemagick or GD instead, which won't compress nearly as well, but will still do a good job w/o imposing those installation requirements for flarum.
Whaddya think?