Would you consider the media gallery addon as essential?

[Cromulent]

I am starting a forum on mental health and was wondering if people thought the media gallery addon would be considered essential or not? I think it would be nice to allow people to upload images that make them feel happy and meme images for a bit of a laugh, but I'm not whether the media gallery would be worth it or not.

 

[Mendalla]

Just the standard forum media handling should be enough for what you describe. I would certainly try without the media gallery before you spent the money.

 

[Forsaken]

As others said, it isn't really needed unless your forum is going to potentially have a heavy media focus. If your forum has a niche that encourages sharing pictures, and you want more structure and organization then it makes a lot of sense, otherwise standard attachments are fine.

 

[tajhay]

No.

 

[beerForo]

For the record, attachment mirroring is a nice function.

 

[Wildcat Media]

I like the addon, but do not like that I'd have to buy extra storage, especially since we've had so many users abuse the attachments in the past ( (such as, uploading the same animated GIF as a reply in a thread--which is against our rules--a couple dozen times). Right now we only let staff upload attachments, and anyone else has to use a third party image host and post them that way.

I don't mind if images are uploaded, but I do mind when it is abused (as with my GIF example), or for those users who pluck copyrighted images from the Web and try to use them in their posts. (We get several copyright emails per year, the creator asking their work not be displayed in our forum.)

If I had an information-heavy site with a staff of creators and contributors, sure, I'd buy the addon in a heartbeat. But for the general forum membership? Never.

 

[Nicolas FR]

You can remove gif extension from allowed extensions at first.
For the copyrrighted medias it's more complicated to prevent users from adding them in their messages.