Im​gur-o-apocalypse is upon us

[NooneAtAll3]

On May 15th 2023, Im​gur will implement its new TOS, in which

We will be focused on removing old, unused, and inactive content that is not tied to a user account.

Presumably many users have uploaded things to Im​gur without logging in, and then posted those images to this forum, meaning many images are in danger of link rot. In addition, the TOS also bans NSFW content, which while not directly a concern here, the enforcement of this TOS would mostly rely on automation, which could falsely flag thousands of images.

Stackexchange has transferred their images to account managed by their administration. Has/will/should this forum do something similar?

I'm not on the discord server, but I suppose this should be of concern there as well.

[dvgrn]

Stackexchange has transferred their images to account managed by their administration. Has/will/should this forum do something similar?

It looks like a forum search for "im​gur" will turn up all of the cases where somebody uploaded a file to im​gur, then shared it as a link or image attachment. There are (as of now) only seven pages of results, including a few false positives like these two posts -- so this is not a particularly large problem for these forums.

Mostly this is because people generally figure out pretty quickly that you can just attach a file to a message, then place it inline -- and it shows up as an image. The default view is the "attachment" view, which is plenty good enough for most people's use of images here. But it's also possible to look up the local link, which will be of the form

ht​tps://conwaylife.com/forums/download/file.php?id=5505

-- and enclose it in [im​g] ... [/img] tags, to get all of the same functionality as any other hosted image. So external hosting is pretty much unnecessary, and almost nobody has ever used it.

I've gone ahead and used my Moderator Shenanigans Powers to patch up several search results that were on the eighth page of an "im​gur" search, to use local images instead. I've left one result on page 8 with both im​gur and local images.

Does anyone see any objection to having all im​gur images silently replaced by local images? We can keep the i.im​gur.com link addresses, if that seems even vaguely possibly useful to anyone -- but I don't see why anyone should really ever be interested in those URLs again, so unless someone posts good reasons to store those details, it probably won't happen.

[Sokwe]

I've moved some more images off of im​gur. I'll move more later unless I hear objections.

We can keep the i.im​gur.com link addresses, if that seems even vaguely possibly useful to anyone -- but I don't see why anyone should really ever be interested in those URLs again, so unless someone posts good reasons to store those details, it probably won't happen.

I also see no reason to keep them and have been dropping them.

[dvgrn]

I've moved some more images off of im​gur. I'll move more later unless I hear objections.
...
I also see no reason to keep them and have been dropping them.

My only objection would be that it would be convenient to drop the word "im​gur" completely every time you make an edit. I've been doing that with my edits, so that a search for "im​gur" will only turn up posts that still need to be edited.

Notice that this post doesn't come up in such searches, because I've added a zero-width space between the "m" and the "g" in each instance of the word. I may edit some more already-completed posts so they don't keep showing up.

EDIT: Down to two digits's worth -- four pages -- of results for "im​gur" (without the zero-width space) already!

By The Way
If anyone has been really wanting to become a conwaylife.com moderator so that they can do really boring editing stuff along these lines, this thread might be a very good place to say so. That seems like a very good and non-worrisome reason to volunteer to become a moderator.

[confocaloid]

I also don't see good reasons to keep old urls. The images themselves will hopefully be preserved, but the details of where they were originally uploaded are probably not interesting.

By The Way
If anyone has been really wanting to become a conwaylife.com moderator so that they can do really boring editing stuff along these lines, this thread might be a very good place to say so. That seems like a very good and non-worrisome reason to volunteer to become a moderator.

Speaking only for myself, I'm not volunteering for several reasons. Main reason is that it's likely that some combination of LWTDS and Murphy's Law will intervene in future. Right now I have some time/resources for LifeWiki editing and posts on the forum, but I cannot tell how long I'll be able to show some sensible activity.

Another reason is potential disagreement, even over seemingly minor and boring issues. It's probably well-known that different people have different opinions over what counts as consistent/obvious/etc. I'd rather remain a "non-moderator user" (just to make it more likely that I'll be able to contribute in constructive ways in future, without accidentally causing too much damage). At least this way nobody can blame me for not doing something that I cannot do at all, or for doing something that I couldn't possibly do.

[Sokwe]

This thread contains several images that are too large to add as attachments to posts. A potential stop-gap is to upload these files to the wiki and then include them in the post with the [img] tag. I did this for the first image only in this post. Unfortunately, my internet connection is quite slow so I'm hoping someone else can do the uploading for these posts (could be anyone with a trusted wiki account; then a moderator can edit the posts to include the images).

My only objection would be that it would be convenient to drop the word "im​gur" completely every time you make an edit. I've been doing that with my edits, so that a search for "im​gur" will only turn up posts that still need to be edited.

Notice that this post doesn't come up in such searches, because I've added a zero-width space between the "m" and the "g" in each instance of the word. I may edit some more already-completed posts so they don't keep showing up.

I wonder if writing "im[i][/i]​gur" accomplishes the same thing. This still renders as "im​gur" and doesn't use hidden special characters.

Edit: it seems to work. This post does not show up when searching the forums for "im​gur". These posts can be found by searching for "gur".

[confocaloid]

This thread contains several images that are too large to add as attachments to posts. A potential stop-gap is to upload these files to the wiki and then include them in the post with the [img] tag. I did this for the first image only in this post. Unfortunately, my internet connection is quite slow so I'm hoping someone else can do the uploading for these posts (could be anyone with a trusted wiki account; then a moderator can edit the posts to include the images).

I've uploaded files from four posts in that thread. The filenames are preserved, except when the first character is a lowercase letter (which becomes uppercase in wiki).

viewtopic.php?p=37275#p37275 : File:U10A4uF.gif File:KrPwsjn.gif File:JMc8UD6.gif
viewtopic.php?p=37402#p37402 : File:ATLA5fR.gif File:R7ZS0bn.gif
viewtopic.php?p=37431#p37431 : File:MfLG69f.gif
viewtopic.php?p=38509#p38509 : File:95Mn65H.gif

[Sokwe]

I've uploaded files from four posts in that thread. The filenames are preserved, except when the first character is a lowercase letter (which becomes uppercase in wiki).

Thanks! I've added the images to their respective posts and protected the wiki pages so they can't be modified.

I've now completed the transfer of all Imgur images to the forums. In two cases (here and here) the Imgur links were to albums, so I attached zip files containing all of the album images. In these cases I also left the Imgur album links intact because it's a nicer way to view the files than downloading the attached zip file.

Some users have Imgur images in their signatures (e.g., BlinkerSpawn), but I seem to have no way to change other users' signatures or even find out which ones have Imgur images.