How and why has this suddenly become an issue?
I post on several other message boards, most of them engineering related, and they all support the 'img' function and not one has ever complained about it's use. Now if someone was actually doing a screen capture of something and then loading that into some 3rd-party site and then linking to that I could see where that could be a problem, but using a common html function which allows you to link directly to the original content seems to be the 'safe' approach since it only takes a minute to verify where the image came from.

OCU