[Findcandor]

.
Thank you, one and all, for your responses. All three of you were most kind.

(By the way, I am noticing while I am in the text box and preparing for this post, all of the functions — bold, italic, etc. — are still oddly inaccessible. I changed browsers, from Chrome to Firefox, and now the functions are working.)

BCFC_1982 figured I had hotlinked (I understood that to mean taking a photo off a site rather than using an image host), but as I had written in my third paragraph (with "Postimage"), I indeed did use an image host.

(Thanks, BCFC_1982, for letting me know, "VEF does not allow images to be directly uploaded.")

(Yet the latter point raises another question. If images are permitted only through image hosters, with their own ready-to-copy-and-paste BB codes, what would be the purpose of the "Insert Image" function atop the post-text window? Now that I am getting the function to work, I noticed it allows for the hotlinking of image URLs. Given the following paragraph, such full-sized images appear to be disallowed at VEF, so this is confusing.)

It looks like Jenny48549 had the best theory as to why my posts were removed. I used the full-sized image and not the thumbnail.

(EDIT: Upon rereading, I see BCFC was wise, as well: "If you did upload to an imagehost then you have not inserted the BBCode from the imagehost.")

Who would have thought this could have been the reason. I can understand the merit of thumbnails when there are a good many photographs, but especially when there are only one or two, frankly, using the full-sized version makes more sense. It saves the user the trouble of clicking on thumbnails.

The explanation was this: "It pulls more bandwidth at the host and some hosts will disable hotlinked images if they get a lot of views." That makes sense as I think about it, but how ironic; I had imagined hosts disable images when the images lie dormant and DO NOT get views.

(In any event, I can't imagine most pages in a forum, even in "a forum as large as this," would be getting so many views that the image hoster would start getting antsy.)

Thank you, Buttsie, for letting me know about this "test forum" (as did BCFC_1982); naturally, I had no idea such a forum was in existence. Regardless, let's put ourselves in the mindset of one such as me.

I had occasionally run into the VEF forum in the past, and thought it to be very nice. At the time of my last visit, all that ran across my mind was, well, I sure appreciated viewing the photos of an actress I got to be temporarily curious about, and perhaps I can put on my Mother Teresa hat and contribute a few shots of my own.

When one gets that little passing "yen," it is not as though one is going to spend more time than is necessary; it was already going to take time to fetch the photos, go through the image hoster, and prepare the posts themselves. Perhaps there are users who may devote an hour or more to seek and learn about the idiosyncrasies of a forum, but when it comes to a seemingly innocuous post conducted for unselfish reasons, I would guess such users would fall into a nearly nonexistent minority. (It does appear there are a good many contributors to the VEF forum who are very dedicated, but I'm guessing they may have come to be that way after the passage of time.)

Unfortunately, the end result of my experience is going to be I won't be in a hurry to prepare my next "giving" post.




.