Wikipedia:Suspend use of stub icons

This page is currently inactive and is retained for historical reference.
Either the page is no longer relevant or consensus on its purpose has become unclear. To revive discussion, seek broader input via a forum such as the village pump.

This is an RFC proposing that all use of stub icons be suspended until we are better able to support them.

Stub icons look cool and help identify an article as a stub. However, serving so many graphic files places a heavy load on the servers, which sometimes makes it difficult to access any graphic files. Icons have already been removed from most popular stub templates, but the remaining icons still seem to have an unacceptable overhead. This is indicated by nasty delays often experienced while browsing the stub template listings.

A bot could go through all existing stub templates, disabling Image: links by surrounding them with HTML comments. These comments would also contain a brief message explaining the problem. When our resources expand so that we can support stub icons again, another bot can reverse the process.