You guys are so confused and with good reason.

The forum and gallery have been rewritten by some dudes who don't know how to implement such things.

With regard to image size, a few months ago I discovered the new site software was taking my uploaded image and re-saving it using its own (inferior) JPEG compressor. This resulted in smaller and very much shittier files in the forum.

I complained loudly and they changed it. But they didn't do the right thing - instead of just saving what you upload, they still re-save it using their JPEG compressor, but they do almost no compression. So the original motivation to reduce storage has resulted instead in increased storage. This is, as I said, because the developer(s) here don't know what they're doing. It is not at all because it needs to be that way. 

Meanwhile, the entire back end is highly unreliable. If you gave it an image format with some JPEG option it doesn't understand, then when it tried to decompress your image in preparation for inflating it using its own stupid compressor, it fails. The result is you can't upload your image. Also the software is buggy. For a while you'd get incomprehensible back-end gibberish like "Invalid S3 credentials". They "fixed" that by lying and telling you "image either doesn't exist, or is uneditable". This is toddler-programmer speak for "I do not know how to make this work".

I don't know if you've noticed, but the forum search has been similarly "improved" so that it does less than it used to do, sometimes so well that it says "No matches" regarding things I've just looked at.

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Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)