XenForo attachments are user owned and are not version-safe, this presents major problems with in a multi-user and versioned environment, as occurs in wiki pages. A lot of people request regular forum attachments, without considering what that means. Regular forum attachments used to be allowed in VaultWiki 3. However, we quickly noticed issues and discouraged/deprecated the behavior; it was fully removed in VaultWiki 4. Some examples:
- If users with different upload permissions edit the same wiki page, some attachments might be lost or the user might be unable to save his edit, because the editing user doesn't have permissions for the existing attachments. There are ways around this. One thing we tried in VW3 was to only allow a single user to add attachments to a page; however, if the user dies or leaves the site, it would be impossible to change them.
- If an attachment is removed from the page in a later edit, standard forum cleanup automatically removes unused attachments after some time. If we later want to view any previous edit or even restore those edits, it is not possible, because the forum's background tasks removed the unused attachment already. This is the especially nefarious issue.
- There were other problems too, but these stand out in my memory.
Regarding non-insertable attachments:
We have had plans to bring back regular forum attachments somewhat (attached to the end of the content or on its own tab), but not as entities pastable into the editor/page text (because that combination would still be victim to the above problems). Even this partial return will require some major feature additions to VaultWiki 4 in order to provide a wiki-safe place for such attachments.
Regarding insertable attachments w/ drag-drop support:
- This might be feasible for regular forum attachments without creating a problem if the wiki has a dedicated fake user that becomes the owner of the uploads, with the original uploader not being the owner of the uploaded content. There would still need to be concessions made to workaround the cleanup problem and other issues.
- Another option is just to add a drag-drop trigger for wiki attachments, prompting the user to enter a name for the image when they drop it, without needing to step through the File Browser first.
This second option is probably easier to implement, avoids the non-user-friendly ATTACH tag, is less hackish than using fake user accounts that the admin might accidentally delete when pruning the member base, and avoids the background cleanup issue entirely.