I'm really against this being mandatory. Some forums are about exchanging important information in a community. Mandatory images and gifs make it much, much harder to read the content of each user's posts, and make discussions almost impossible to skim for the data you were looking for. Especially when the same users are posting again and again, you waste a ton of time seeing repetitive images. I get that images and gifs let you express yourself, but the reason people join a community or a forum is to gain valuable knowledge about some topic - and this seems like it could really impede that.
