Photos, lots and formatting: what the composer can do

The composer is a normal rich-text editor with a few things in it that are specific to this forum. None of it is essential — a plain paragraph is a perfectly good post — but the photo and lot handling is what makes a damage question answerable.

Photos

Drag them in, paste them from the clipboard, or use the image button. Both drag and paste work, including pasting a screenshot straight out of a snipping tool.

• JPEG, PNG, WebP, GIF and AVIF. Anything else is refused.
• 8 MB per file. A phone photo is usually well under that.
• Images wider or taller than 2000px are resized down on upload. You do not need to shrink them first.
• Every upload is decoded and re-encoded on our side before it is stored. Metadata attached by your camera or phone — including GPS coordinates, if your camera saves them — does not survive that. That is a security measure rather than a privacy feature, but it has the privacy effect too.

For a damage question, the photos that get useful answers are the ones the auction does not take: the underside, the inside of the wheel arch, the radiator support from above, the airbag modules, and a straight-on shot of the panel gaps.

Lots

Paste a SalvageAlert lot link, a VIN link, or a bare 17-character VIN, and it becomes a card under your post with the year, make, model, damage, odometer, title type and photo. Up to six per post.

The card is stored with the post, so it survives the auction taking its own listing down — which IAA and Copart both do about two days after a sale. It also re-checks the live catalogue when somebody reads the thread, so a card shows today's state where the lot is still listed and the frozen snapshot where it is not.

There is an Attach lot button that searches by VIN, stock number or description if you do not have the link to hand.

Formatting

The toolbar covers bold, italic, bullet and numbered lists, quotes and code blocks. Markdown shortcuts work as you type: ## for a heading, - for a bullet, > for a quote, backticks for code.

Tables are supported and are the right format for a cost breakdown. A landed-cost answer written as a table gets read; the same numbers in a paragraph do not.

Polls

Available on the first post of a thread. Single or multiple choice. Results stay hidden until you have voted — showing a running total to somebody who has not answered is how a poll becomes a measurement of its own first three votes.

Drafts

The composer saves what you are writing every few seconds, per channel and per thread. Close the tab mid-post and it is there when you come back. A restored draft says so, with a button to discard it.

Changing the channel on a new post does not overwrite what you have written.

Translation

Every post has a translate button under it that renders it in your interface language. It is machine translation and it is labelled as such — good enough to read a Polish answer in Romanian, not good enough to sign a contract from.

That is why you should write in whichever language you actually think in. A precise question in Polish is worth far more than an approximate one in English, because the translation of a precise question is still precise.

Editing

Edits are kept. A post that has been edited says so, and staff can see the previous version. That is not surveillance — it is what makes it safe for somebody to correct a number in their own post rather than leaving a wrong one up because deleting looks worse.

Editing does not bump the thread back to the top of the feed, so fixing a typo does not re-notify everybody who is subscribed.

Keyboard

/ focuses search, j and k move between posts, r replies, g then h goes to the forum index, and ? shows the full list. Ctrl+Enter posts.

Sources

Verified 2026-09-21. Rates, fees and legal requirements change. Check the sources before acting on a number here.