Sorry for bumping this topic but I think we still need that feature. There are some important reasons why external images should NOT be downloaded locally (at least in some cases):
Downloading local copies breaks HTML
This bug only affects external images (not uploaded directly to DevForum)
Let’s say you want to center your images then you should do something like this:
<div align="center">
<img alt="My Image" src="https://link/to/some/image.png">
</div>
After saving it everything will break, take a look at this example:
(Before and After)
That’s because DevForum creates Markdown images regardless if they were previously inside HTML. And then guess what? Markdown won’t render inside HTML.
Support for API
Because of downloading local copies it is currently impossible to create dynamic images. I created stats API from my plugin but I can’t even use it on DevForum as link should be called every time you open or refresh the page to get latest data. Take a look how it should look like on this GitHub repo. Here is also screenshot of that:
And there is link to one of these badges and my custom API response required for that badge.
Also @Automationeer isn’t right. After you edit your post new images will be replaced with local copies again after 2 minutes or something. Here is the proof: