User blog comment:DaNASCAT/Technical Update: September 9, 2015/@comment-25801460-20150910214518/@comment-26009167-20150910215327

May we ask why they have to be stored on Wikia now? There's a lot of emoticons that communities will have to move over.

EDIT: Also, there is absolutely no security risk that an image could cause. Nothing inside an image is a command or computer code that gets executed. All this causes is a hassle for communities with large amounts of emotes.