litphoria

I think it'd be good to be able to upload a picture into a roleplay and have it displayed as a thumbnail to the right of the text, something like this: http://puu.sh/hle1e/4ad20c55f9.jpg

But you know, not so crude looking. It could use the cropping tool from profiles so that all the pictures would have the same dimensions, and roleplayers who wanted to see the full image could click through, while at the same time not being too super intrusive for those who care more about the text.

I don't think it'd lead to people trying to use lit as a kind of imageboard, but both issues might be handled if there was simply a setting to hide all embedded images.

Two issues. One, using an image instead of a description is a cop-out. "I don't want to describe this character! Just pretend it looks like this image I linked!" I've seen this transpire on other sites as well where it's still frowned upon, but backed up by certain site demographics as an "enhancer". Even though there's art based on my character,* it would just be superfluous because it could never capture the essence of my description, no matter what superficial features they borrow. I'd still want to use my written character description.

Secondly, turning role-play into a multimedia project is tantamount to plutocracy. Users disinterested or lacking the resources of somebody to advertise the way they spend their free time online would be at a disadvantage. We already have chat rooms where role-play is doled out based on whoever whores the most HTML coding in their profiles. It's not so much a worry of the site being inadvertently re-purposed as yet another clique-y image board where artists thinking they own the internet come complaining about more viewers discovering their art because it's getting distributed. I haven't seen much in the way of networking role-playing on this site thus far, but commercialization creates a caste system that people complain about over the entire internet. This is, in turn, an inherent stifling of creativity.

I can see images being useful if your role-play is tabletop-oriented and you want to use a map or something for players getting too confused if they can't hang on to specific minutiae, but even so, if this option did pass, I'd recommend the option to disable it for role-plays.

Okay. I have decided that I am not interested at this time in embedding images per-post. I am more okay with embed cover images into settings (litphoria.com) as this limits it to the use I can see out of this, such as sharing a map, floor plan, something exceptionally detailed, without potentially introducing the ability to reduce it to posting done just by images.

Rejected for now.