Uploading transparent images to forums?

[Sen_Isu]

Is there a way of uploading transparent images to the forums, and having them stay transparent?

It seems directly uploading a transparent PNG will immediately convert it to a JPG. Linking to an imgur or other external image seems to work at first, but eventually it gets converted to a JPG hosted on the forums

[Sasha_Nemtsov]

Hi Sen; I’m no expert but -

Our forum is Discord based, so the same core rules apply here, as there.
Discord seems currently to convert uploaded PNG files to the JPG format - even though the transparency may be present when the upload is made.

A quick check with Google returned a lot of folks asking the same question - and a variety of answers/solutions/frustrations.

Hopefully, someone with more experience of Discord will see your thread and help you out!

[Qia_Kare]

I hate to be picky, but I think you mean “Discourse” instead of “Discord”.

[Wanda_Fayne]

[Zhalyd_Lyehin]

You have to upload it every single time anew. If you just copy it or the link from a previous upload, it turns non-transparent. If I copied the star below it would get a black square background.

[Sasha_Nemtsov]

Please be picky, Qia! It is a route to learning!

I was basing my information on This post, which begins ‘ThunderED is a perfect EVE community management platform based on Discord as the main communication platform.’

EDIT: I traced the post I half-remembered reading. Not my area of expertise, so I may still have it muddled.

[Qia_Kare]

Discourse is a platform for hosting forums on the internet. Their homepage even lists CCP as a user with a screen shot of the forum. (At least at the time I visited it. It could be a randomized list on the front page and I wouldn’t know, having visited it only this once.)

Discourse - Civilized Discussion

You may already know this, but Discord is a voice chat and instant messaging platform, and ThunderED is a ‘bot’ for Discord. I used to use ThunderED in a Discord server to, for example, pipe kills from zKillboard into the chat that happened in our theater of operations so we know who was lurking in the dark. It also notified us of structure reinforcements and when the repair timers would be coming up.

If you have an Eve community (probably a corporation or alliance, but could be a NPSI fleet organizer or whatever floats your boat) and if that community has a presence on Discord, then you can host an instance of ThunderED to provide some Eve specific functions inside the Discord app, but it would not do anything that changes or affects the official Eve forum.

I know you mean well and you always treat people on the forum with a great deal of respect. I had little time to compose that hasty post, but I wanted to spare someone potentially diving into a rabbit hole of Discord searches to solve a Discourse problem.

I still do not like issuing a correction. It feels like penalizing someone for trying to help. You are right, of course. It is a route to learning. I can’t help but worry about making someone feel bad when I do it, though, so I try to do it as softly as I can but I didn’t have the time in this case to do as good a job as I’d have liked.

[Sasha_Nemtsov]

Hi Qia, no; you did perfectly well!

I’m happy to be corrected, and grateful to you for your detailed clarification. Hopefully the OP will now be able to track down that solution!

[Sen_Isu]

I’m unable to recreate this. When i hit Upload and select my image, it immediately gets converted to a JPG (as I said in the OP)

I wonder if it has something to do with image size…

[Sasha_Nemtsov]

Hi Sen, below is (I hope) an image of an iPhone outline which I downloaded free from a website and uploaded into this post by clicking the ‘upload’ icon in the bar above. If I click ‘reply’ and it doesn’t work - it’s back to the drawing board!

EDIT: It’s a transparency in PNG format.

[Qia_Kare]

I’ve done a little digging and the issue here could be any number of things that depend on the specific settings whoever is in control of this specific instance of Discourse has set, but most likely it has to do with resizing the image and transparency of the resized image being disabled or poorly configured.

An image can be resized for a number of reasons, among these are the file size is too large, or the image has pixel dimensions that fall out of a set range. By default, Discourse will resize images too wide to fit in what it considers the post’s width, but the forum administrator can tweak this behavior in a variety of ways and I don’t know how to see what those settings currently are to know what exact limits apply.

[Sen_Isu]

Thank you - I’ll explore the idea of image size being the issue