Thank you for the response, John.
Garden-variety Fool,
The hot linking of the image is intended behaviour I believe even with pMcode the predecessor to BBCode. It is not meant to embed the image within your post.
Does that make sense?
No, I’m afraid it does not, at least not to me. The documentation for that entry says, “You can easily display an image,” which suggests that the purpose of that tag is, in fact, to show an image within the post. Furthermore, conventional use of BBCode, as shown in the example at Wikipedia, is clearly for this tag to display the image located at the URL enclosed within.
The whole reason this became an issue in the first place is because the client is expressing frustration at not being able to get images to show up this way, as they are accustomed to being able to do in other forum software. At the moment, the client is contemplating switching to another forum application, one that is “easier” to work with than the EE forums (they are currently thinking of switching to SMF, where you can see that the documentation shows the ability to post images using this tag). Doing this will, of course, break the integration between the rest of the EE site and the forums (which is the most frequently visited part of this particular client’s site), at which point I’m pretty sure someone will suggest moving away from EE for the content management side of things as well. It might sound pretty ridiculous, but the client is seriously that unhappy about the inability to display images in forum posts this way. Unhappy enough to throw out an entire EE-driven site and start over again with something else.
Incidentally, here is the example from the Wikipedia page, pasted exactly as is below. In true BBCode, this should show an image of a house, but what do you see instead? A link.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7c/Go-home.svg/100px-Go-home.svg.png
How, then, are users supposed to add images to forum posts? Is the only option to allow all HTML (a practice that is clearly not recommended) and have the users post something like the following?
I hope that’s not the case.
