On Sun, 11 Jun 2006 17:56:00 -0500, Gian Paolo Mureddu wrote:
some of the archaic Netiquette rules seem to be way over the board nowadays
That's USENET, and there's nothing that says that newsgroups have to be part of USENET. There's also nothing that says that a community cannot define its own rules in its own newsgroups.
NNTP handles message attachments just fine (using MIME or uuenocding), and as Jon points out, a good newsreader can be configured to download messages under a certain size. I use Pan myself (on Linux), and have it configured to download headers only in binary groups, so I can decide whether or not to download binary attachments at all.
But I also tend towards posting links to large images, and post a smaller image in the message. There's no need to post a 1400x1050 image in any sort of message board just because that happens to be the screen size of my laptop. So I'll post a 640x480 or 800x600 image and link to a larger image on my webserver. There are plenty of ways of making high-resolution images available without selecting an inadequate piece of forum software solely on the basis that you want to have images hosted in the forums.
Jim