Mick wrote: ↑Wed May 02, 2018 1:11 pm
I would say the average user today should be on the ball, there was no internet and very basic computers when a lot of us started out. People today are taught computing in school and have connected devices from the age of 18 months, some from birth by the looks of it. There's no excuse for not being able to edit an image really apart from bone idleness. There's also this thing that users want to post the biggest images they can find like 2240 x 1680 when, for normal useage, 640 x 480 is plenty for a bulletin board.
The person ages 35-50 has better patience and willingness to learn new things. When the Internet came along, we were curious and wanted to learn how to use it. The younger generation expects it to work for them. Other people just aren't techy and struggle to learn new things. People who run forums on a non-tech general subject of interest, eg cars, attract a wide range of potentially interested users and, although I agree resizing images is not hard, it is a bit elitist to keep software as it is and assume our users should just adapt. This is part of why forums are hemorrhaging users to social media. They'd rather walk and use a different platform that meets their needs rathan than adapt.
Images are that large because the vast majority of people are taking photos with their smartphone with super high mega-pixel cameras. They have no idea how to lower quality settings and just stick with the default resolution of the device. Of course, it is easy to edit photos from a phone and reduce image size etc. But put yourself in someone else's shoes - they have no reason to learn how to change things because they are accustomed to modern platforms reducing any images and enabling them to easily edit them on the fly...Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat all do this out of the box. This is something that has been pretty much standard for 10 years. Why shouldn't they expect phpBB to do the same?