Users love to upload screenshots (or even worse, “out-of-focus dusty screens with flash on and reflections of their kitchen” screenshots taken on a phone.
Most of the time, this is text and could easily be clipped and uploaded as preformatted text.
Can we have a small note which appears when an image upload is attempted to ask if it’s REALLY required and would clipped text not be far more appropriate? People will mostly ignore it I’d guess but if you don’t prompt them…
If it cuts down on the number of pictures of laptop screens showing journalctl messages by only 10% it would be a blessing, consume less space and make more of the questions asked more searchable by people trying to do their own research.
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How about we change that ‘what is fpaste?’ pinned article to be a ‘how to post great questions?’ pinned post and include it in there? We could - as you have suggested put the inxi and lsusb and etc common commands, ask which desktop, etc.
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I’m up for anything which cuts down on the amount of screenshots! 
I’ve also filed a PR with Ankur to get some documentation changes added to fpaste. If that’s deemed acceptable I’ll start knocking out some code, so updates to the fpaste pinned article can be made at the same time I guess. Can’t hurt.
I’ve seen people unironically complain about quick phone pics and full-text descriptions saying to use PrtSc; I don’t get it: The information is there 
I’m not sure on specifics, but there’s plenty of times where I can take a phone pic and upload it faster than trying to hand-select text and make it pretty (although I’d sooner do that then going through fpaste or another system).
If a user is requesting help: provide the help vs questioning their asking format I haven’t seen any posts that made me question whether a pic or text would be more useful, and pic or text showing the same info doesn’t change the help request.
If anything that might be more of a server host concern with file sizes on 4K phone pics, but also could be SEO-mix with wanting plaintext more visible on searches (still neither really affect the original poster’s help request).
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It’s not about speed though - it’s about having indexable, searchable text. “I get this weird message” and a search in here finds someone else with the same issue. You don’t get that option with a screenshot of some text. I get it - sometimes you’re wrecked on connectivity and you’re using your phone to try to fix a knackered install or graphical issue which leaves you with a black screen… by all means, upload a screenshot. It’s better than nothing.
Sometimes though, there’s a screenshot of the text AND the text… a little bit of user education and encouragement to just paste that actual data rather than an out of focus, blurred, smudged picture of the actual data makes the hive-mind repository of “you’re not alone - here’s how another user fixed the same issue with the same error message” better for everyone.
But who should really care about that besides SEO?
It is for users like me, who search for error strings, to find other users with similar errors that then find resolution in those threads.
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Have you witnessed a specific scenario?
I’m thinking advanced issues would be posted with full plain-text searchable details, from users familiar with troubleshooting those kinds of issue.
Easy or common issues might be posted by less-experienced users, but those issues might not be new (like GSK_RENDERER stuff; newbies experience graphical issues, experienced users know random stuff like GSK_RENDERER=vulkan and post it as a suggestion, then it gets the plaintext/search related term reference)
I’m not sure how to know if I ever missed an interesting post if it was only a screenshot, but so far I’ve been fine with troubleshooting
Not very specific, but whenever I have an error i just copy it and paste it into Ecosia, looking for possible answers. If the error was copied as text, then I can search it easily. And those often aren’t super serious or advanced issues like, idk, “GDM crashed and I can’t log in”, but more like, e.g. “dnf gave this weird output” (i don’t really use dnf, but you catch my meaning)
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