GIFs & Images over 4mb

The forums have a max GIF/Image size of 4mb. That’s not a big deal, I can work with that. The annoying thing is the interface doesn’t tell you it’s over 4mb until after you’ve posted. Is there a way to get a pop-up warning before you actually submit the post?

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I’m guessing this is a Discourse issue that they can’t do much about, but I agree it’s annoying.

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Yep, not a darn thing we can do about a size notification. It’s tripped me up more than once too, and expletives may have been said at the time.

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I think that’s probably the case. I was just hoping that maybe there was a “notify user” checkbox hidden somewhere in the bowels of Discourse. Oh well.

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I’ve been digging around on a Discourse dev board and it appears there are ways to change that limit, but I can’t find anything about a “Hey, do you want to fix this first? 'Cause I ain’t displaying an image that big.” function.

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Yeah, there is another Discourse forum I am a member of that does not have this 4mb limitation, so Discourse clearly can do gifs over that size.

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I personally think that if the GIF size cap is raised, a per-device/browser/app user setting to prevent autoloading of GIFs should also be added to balance things out for those with bandwidth or quota issues (particularly on mobile devices).

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Another potential issue with raising the cap is how Discourse creates and hosts local copies of everything posted. Since we don’t know the hosting details it may not be feasible to allocate that much server space to user images.

(I have no knowledge of the this, just thinking out loud … errrrm, in type.)

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I’ve noticed that the forum has recently stopped caching hotlinked (still?) images. It still loads a scaled inline image, but to view it full-size the forum kicks you over to the image URL instead of loading an overlay with the magnified image. For example,

This behavior does not apply to images uploaded directly to the forum, as one might expect, since they’re stored on the forum itself.

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Interesting—thank you. I hadn’t noticed that.