Good ol' "USA is #1 in everything" does not apply to the internet, anybody on the outskirts of a town, where the space between houses starts getting wider, is out of luck on broadband. The telephone companies are next to oil companies in extortion.
I'd say your estimate is off, dialup is still 50% of the market, and as folks tighten the belt in hard times, broadband is a luxury quickly dropped.
And the history of the "img" rule is some folks did not/would not (after continuous pleas by moderators) reduce the size of the pixel count, or did not adjust the width of the image, which stretched all the comments waaaaaaay to the right.
Moderators could NOT enjoy the forum for fixing up so many of the images.
In other words, a thread would be easy to scroll down, until somebody/anybody put a super-wide or non-reduced pixeled picture into the mix.
That forced all the text, above and below, to go wide (take up more than a screen), or the thread to bounce continuously as the picture slowly loaded,
unreadable to a dial-upper who was trying to follow the newer text down below.
And a lot of the moderators were/are on dialup, have to read ten times as many threads as casual members, which is difficult when the screen is way too wide or bouncing up and down.
I use an image from a third source in the text now and then, but if it is from my camera, I try to put it in the reduced in size image links below.
That guy from Chicago put his uncle's collection in images yesterday, but he doesn't know that the dialuppers simply skip it, can't spend 10 minutes waiting for the shots to appear. If he had it as img links, we could click on it and comment.
And as to:
What if everyone thought like that?
Would the vendors want to advertise to just the mods?
It appears to the 90% of the MBfolks who AREN'T vendors, who are not buying or selling anything, that long standing sourness amongst THEM constantly oozes into various threads.
Most folks who join already have an engine, and those that don't shouldn't be suddenly exposed to some grudge/shouting match that most of us don't know anything about OR care anything about.
Building bikes is no money-maker,
it's a hobby, and giving free advise to folks, to try and save them money or hassles is the MAIN reason for the forum.
I advertise in the weekly shoppers guide newspaper, the only time I sent steel blanks to somebody, I lost $15 in the dealio, and didn't even get a thank you note, much less recover the $7 in postage.
And the
only time I tried to buy something from here, over a year ago for a tool, from a so called upstanding vendor, I sent $12 cash and a SASE, and never received it.
Now I simply ignore his threads and carry on. I could have pestered every one of his threads, "WHERES MY 4 WAY BIKE WRENCH??" but that is just the kind of pettiness that makes "vending in an open forum format" an iffy proposition.
Gripes about vendors should be in THEIR websites and e-mails, MB.com shouldn't have to worry about who ripped who off, or who won't send this to whereever.
When it bleeds into all the various threads and won't stay confined to the vending area, it causes all this irrelevent to bikes/engines blathering.
