Imgur seems to be a major host for random images that people want to include in posts here, so I wanted to share the following news story I came across recently. The deletion of old and anonymous images will likely create a lot of dead images on the forum, and could have implications for where we advise people to upload images in the future.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/04/hosting-site-imgur-will-remove-explicit-and-anonymous-content-next-month/
It's mainly relegated to NSFW images, and if the supposed OnlyFans crackdown on porn is anything to go by, not much will actually happen here. But thanks for the notice anyway.
The forum is more likely to be impacted by the deletion of old images not associated with a user account than anything else.
Quote from: Quillz on April 23, 2023, 11:21:33 PM
It's mainly relegated to NSFW images, and if the supposed OnlyFans crackdown on porn is anything to go by, not much will actually happen here. But thanks for the notice anyway.
OF cracking down on porn? I thought that was OF's only reason for existing.
Quote from: hbelkins on April 24, 2023, 01:00:04 PM
Quote from: Quillz on April 23, 2023, 11:21:33 PM
It's mainly relegated to NSFW images, and if the supposed OnlyFans crackdown on porn is anything to go by, not much will actually happen here. But thanks for the notice anyway.
OF cracking down on porn? I thought that was OF's only reason for existing.
They reversed the decision days later because they realized that they couldn't exist without it.
Quote from: Scott5114 on April 23, 2023, 11:30:24 PM
The forum is more likely to be impacted by the deletion of old images not associated with a user account than anything else.
Okay, maybe I'm an idgit, but how can images be posted in the first place without a user account?
Quote from: wanderer2575 on April 24, 2023, 01:53:15 PM
Okay, maybe I'm an idgit, but how can images be posted in the first place without a user account?
With the [New post] button at the top of the page.
Quote from: kphoger on April 24, 2023, 01:56:36 PM
Quote from: wanderer2575 on April 24, 2023, 01:53:15 PM
Okay, maybe I'm an idgit, but how can images be posted in the first place without a user account?
With the [New post] button at the top of the page.
I'll be darned. I never noticed one can do that. I wonder why the button is still there now.
Oh well. Imgur sucks anyway.
Many of my posts here and on other forums are simply screenshots that were auto-uploaded to Imgur without an account. I won't really have time to repair all of the broken images, so RIP to my posts.
Quote from: vdeane on April 23, 2023, 03:24:53 PM
Imgur seems to be a major host for random images that people want to include in posts here, so I wanted to share the following news story I came across recently. The deletion of old and anonymous images will likely create a lot of dead images on the forum, and could have implications for where we advise people to upload images in the future.
Quote from: Bruce on April 24, 2023, 03:38:15 PM
Many of my posts here and on other forums are simply screenshots that were auto-uploaded to Imgur without an account. I won't really have time to repair all of the broken images, so RIP to my posts.
I seem to recall that at some point after the Photobucket meltdown, either kphoger or J N Winkler made the reasonable comment that you more or less have to view any sort of image storage service as being impermanent and that eventually content is going to disappear. Especially if the service is one that doesn't charge a fee.
Quote from: 1995hoo on April 24, 2023, 03:53:58 PM
I seem to recall that at some point after the Photobucket meltdown, either kphoger or J N Winkler made the reasonable comment that you more or less have to view any sort of image storage service as being impermanent and that eventually content is going to disappear. Especially if the service is one that doesn't charge a fee.
It was |Duke87|.
Quote from: Duke87 on July 10, 2017, 07:42:08 PM
General, broad bit of wisdom here: any internet-based service is inherently perishable. There is nowhere you can upload pictures to and safely assume will still be there for years to come. The "safest" option is to purchase your own web hosting, but even that depends on your hosting service not itself going belly up (see: Geocities).
My advice on how to handle this: organize your photos on your own hard drive (and keep backups, of course), and forget about trying to maintain albums on any internet-based service. Then when you feel the need to share a photo on a forum, upload it to whatever free site is currently available that allows hotlinking (e.g. Imgur), post it in the thread, and leave it at that. Don't even bother trying to keep photos organized on Imgur or save the links. If you want to share the same photo again, just reupload it.
After some time the current free site du jour will change their policies or vanish off the face of the web and all of the images linked to it in old threads will break. Accept this, it is inevitable. Don't make threads with the intent of them being image galleries to be preserved for all time, because you can't actually do that unless you own your own server. The only storage you can truly rely on is storage you directly physically control.
What kind of explicit content is on this forum? Interstate porn? Sounds gross.
Quote from: Roadgeekteen on April 24, 2023, 04:17:44 PM
What kind of explicit content is on this forum? Interstate porn? Sounds gross.
In internet forum lingo, button copy probably counts as "road porn" around here.
But at any rate, that's not the issue: it's that they're
also going after orphaned images–those uploaded without an account login. Several users on here have gone that route for image hosting, therefore their images will likely stop rendering on the forum because of it.
Quote from: Roadgeekteen on April 24, 2023, 04:17:44 PM
What kind of explicit content is on this forum? Interstate porn? Sounds gross.
Maps of Florida.
Quote from: Roadgeekteen on April 24, 2023, 04:17:44 PMWhat kind of explicit content is on this forum? Interstate porn? Sounds gross.
Rule 34: "If it exists, there is porn of it." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_34)
Quote from: kphoger on April 24, 2023, 04:21:54 PMBut at any rate, that's not the issue: it's that they're also going after orphaned images–those uploaded without an account login. Several users on here have gone that route for image hosting, therefore their images will likely stop rendering on the forum because of it.
This is the real concern, given that the fastest and lowest-friction route to image hosting on this forum is to paste a screenshot (or snip thereof) to Imgur as an anonymous upload. And even with stable image hosting, many images on this forum don't display simply because of the change from HTTP to HTTPS. My sign drawings in the Road-Related Illustrations thread no longer display for this reason, even though they are still available online.
I've toyed with the idea of writing an image archiver to ensure that I at least have a local copy of every image I have uploaded here. I haven't saved screenshots, because that is an extra step and I permanently archive the original anyway, but not doing so means my posts have no context if embedded images disappear, unless I explicitly specify what the screenshot shows in each and every case (which I know I have not done).
Imgur's plan to "burn the Library of Alexandria" (as one of the Twitterati describes it) will force this issue.
Quote from: J N Winkler on April 24, 2023, 04:57:10 PM
And even with stable image hosting, many images on this forum don't display simply because of the change from HTTP to HTTPS. My sign drawings in the Road-Related Illustrations thread no longer display for this reason, even though they are still available online.
I thought that was a browser-specific issue.
Considering that Chrome controls roughly 65% of the browser market, with Safari (I'd guess mainly Mac/iPhone users) controlling roughly 19% and the remaining 16% being everyone else (including Edge and Opera, both of which share a codebase with Chrome; Firefox is only 3%), calling that a "browser-specific issue" is an understatement.
Quote from: vdeane on April 24, 2023, 08:29:55 PM
Considering that Chrome controls roughly 65% of the browser market, with Safari (I'd guess mainly Mac/iPhone users) controlling roughly 19% and the remaining 16% being everyone else (including Edge and Opera, both of which share a codebase with Chrome; Firefox is only 3%), calling that a "browser-specific issue" is an understatement.
I was under the impression Jonathan was a Firefox user, and that the issue was not present on Firefox.
I think our highway pictures will be spared...
Quote from: kphoger on April 24, 2023, 08:34:04 PMI was under the impression Jonathan was a Firefox user, and that the issue was not present on Firefox.
This is true. And actually, before I posted earlier in this thread, I didn't check that the images I had uploaded were still visible in Firefox; they are. I think I failed to see them the last time I visited the Road-Related Illustrations thread on my tablet (which uses Chrome) and assumed they were hidden because the image URL tags used HTTP while the hosting server now uses HTTPS and was not honoring the old HTTP URLs. But this is not correct--it does still respond to HTTP.
In case anyone wants to test: if images render in this post, you should see a reference to the use of artillery to trigger avalanches (https://www.aaroads.com/forum/index.php?topic=575.msg183069#msg183069).
Quote from: epzik8 on April 24, 2023, 08:41:02 PM
I think our highway pictures will be spared...
Considering that they're getting rid of images not tied to an account and our official advise on how to post images has been to upload them to Imgur without bothering to create an account there? I'm not so sure.
Quote from: vdeane on April 24, 2023, 08:29:55 PM
Considering that Chrome controls roughly 65% of the browser market, with Safari (I'd guess mainly Mac/iPhone users) controlling roughly 19% and the remaining 16% being everyone else (including Edge and Opera, both of which share a codebase with Chrome; Firefox is only 3%), calling that a "browser-specific issue" is an understatement.
It is an issue that can easily be avoided by not using a browser written by morons. Thus, it is a browser-specific issue.
(Lest you dispute the "morons" part of this sentence, this is the same company that, when having a product of a Verazzano Narrows Bridge sign submitted to their Merchant Center, automatically categorized it as "Live Animals", then flagged it as being against their policies on selling live animals. The Mid-Hudson Bridge was flagged because it is apparently some kind of knife, and the Dallas-Fort Worth Turnpike was a paintball gun. So, yes, they're morons.)
Quote from: kphoger on April 24, 2023, 08:34:04 PM
Quote from: vdeane on April 24, 2023, 08:29:55 PM
Considering that Chrome controls roughly 65% of the browser market, with Safari (I'd guess mainly Mac/iPhone users) controlling roughly 19% and the remaining 16% being everyone else (including Edge and Opera, both of which share a codebase with Chrome; Firefox is only 3%), calling that a "browser-specific issue" is an understatement.
I was under the impression Jonathan was a Firefox user, and that the issue was not present on Firefox.
I use Firefox and it was an issue, but there was some sort of setting tweak to fix it. It was so long ago I forget what it was.
Quote from: Scott5114 on April 24, 2023, 10:42:14 PM
It is an issue that can easily be avoided by not using a browser written by morons. Thus, it is a browser-specific issue.
Is there any browser
not written by morons? I use Safari. The images load for me, but it's "written by morons" as it's the only major one that doesn't have a setting to reject downloads, which is essential if you want to avoid malware. I have it set to ask which folder to download any potential downloads, and I can click "cancel" rather than choosing a folder, but this isn't obvious at all.
Quote from: 1 on April 25, 2023, 08:40:52 AM
Quote from: Scott5114 on April 24, 2023, 10:42:14 PM
It is an issue that can easily be avoided by not using a browser written by morons. Thus, it is a browser-specific issue.
Is there any browser not written by morons? I use Safari. The images load for me, but it's "written by morons" as it's the only major one that doesn't have a setting to reject downloads, which is essential if you want to avoid malware. I have it set to ask which folder to download any potential downloads, and I can click "cancel" rather than choosing a folder, but this isn't obvious at all.
I'd like to think that Vivaldi is good, but it's Chromium-based so it inherits a lot of Chrome issues, like deeming that pages use too much memory and blocking content to save memory despite the fact that browsing was smooth and there was no issue. That said, I don't think the HTTPS thing is one of them. How is one supposed to know that the image that is trying to load is the real image and not malware injected by a third party (this actually happens with malicious banner ads... one reason to use an adblocker)? Roadgeeks just don't like it because so many of our hobby sites never added SSL support, so it causes issues with embedding images to the forum. This is the type of thing where IE used to display the "display mixed content" error/warning/prompt.
Quote from: hbelkins on April 24, 2023, 01:00:04 PM
Quote from: Quillz on April 23, 2023, 11:21:33 PM
It's mainly relegated to NSFW images, and if the supposed OnlyFans crackdown on porn is anything to go by, not much will actually happen here. But thanks for the notice anyway.
OF cracking down on porn? I thought that was OF's only reason for existing.
They were trying to become "family friendly" or w/e and there was a lot of articles about them taking down all the porn. Then absolutely nothing happened.
Quote from: J N Winkler on April 24, 2023, 08:54:04 PM
Quote from: kphoger on April 24, 2023, 08:34:04 PM
I was under the impression Jonathan was a Firefox user, and that the issue was not present on Firefox.
This is true. And actually, before I posted earlier in this thread, I didn't check that the images I had uploaded were still visible in Firefox; they are. I think I failed to see them the last time I visited the Road-Related Illustrations thread on my tablet (which uses Chrome) and assumed they were hidden because the image URL tags used HTTP while the hosting server now uses HTTPS and was not honoring the old HTTP URLs. But this is not correct--it does still respond to HTTP.
FYI, I just noticed this is happening in Edge too.
So all those photos I spent years sorting are going to just disappear?