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Imgur Removing Inactive / NSFW Images
Keep Looking:
Hi all
Since quite a lot of people here use and/or have used Imgur to host images on the forum, I've decided to make a thread to address Imgur's new terms of service in which they have stated they plan on removing old images not tied to accounts as well as nsfw images.
Here is a good article which summarises the situation, but in short to quote from Imgur:
"We will be focused on removing old, unused, and inactive content that is not tied to a user account from our platform as well as nudity, pornography, & sexually explicit content. Most notably, this would include explicit/pornographic content."
If you think you have images hosted on Imgur that might be at risk of removal, please consider moving them to a different hosting site. One of the great things about a forum like this is the luxury we have to view images and artworks from throughout the fandom's history, so if images get removed from Imgur this will affect much of our own archives. If people have any suggestions for how to deal with this, especially with older images and threads and inactive users, please let us know.
JoB:
--- Quote from: Keep Looking on April 22, 2023, 09:28:51 AM ---If people have any suggestions for how to deal with this, especially with older images and threads and inactive users, please let us know.
--- End quote ---
... would it be possible to have the forum's DB systematically scanned for all links pointing to Imgur, to get an idea how much storage space we'd need to have for a while-the-clock-still-ticks backup?
wavewright62:
I have no idea about the capabilities JoB asked about, but I am massively concerned about this, from the 'stuff not to do' section:
--- Quote ---Also, don't use Imgur to host image libraries you link to from elsewhere, content for your website, advertising, avatars, or anything else that turns us into your content delivery network.
--- End quote ---
Does that not explicitly ban all the images we host there for use on here? Besides my own output that I've shared here, I personally, as a mod who runs Forum events, have hundreds of images stored in my hidden imgur account. This includes scads of reaction images, and all of the offerings for the Advent Calendar over the last 5 years. Come to think of it, the numerals we use for the calendar days are themselves imgur files, that aren't on my account.
At one point I started to save some images onto my imgur as a Forum archive to avoid the fate of the fanworks hosted on Photobucket that are now dead links. I didn't get very far, though, due to time constraints, and now have even less time these days.
And to be honest, are the alternative hosting platforms more trustworthy?
Keep Looking:
--- Quote ---Also, don't use Imgur to host image libraries you link to from elsewhere, content for your website, advertising, avatars, or anything else that turns us into your content delivery network.
--- End quote ---
Yes, that clause in particular is very concerning for our site. On the one hand, I don't know how they'd be able to determine that the images on Imgur from our users are being posted elsewhere, but it is very much how forum users have used Imgur.
I know that I have a few images I've hosted on Imgur, so I'm definitely going to download those and make sure they're backed up.
--- Quote from: wavewright62 on April 23, 2023, 06:11:03 AM ---And to be honest, are the alternative hosting platforms more trustworthy?
--- End quote ---
That's the problem with image hosting platforms, I guess - you never know when the image host is going to change terms, or kick the bucket, or otherwise compromise your images. And I don't think our forum itself has the capacity to host all its own images - that'd require very large amounts of storage space that we presumably don't have.
I can ask Hushpiper, who manages the databases, if there's any way we can get an idea of how many images we'd need to back up. In order to properly back up any substantial number of images, though, we'd have to have a team effort and also concentrate our efforts on particular areas - I suspect it would be very difficult to try and back up every single image on the forum that is hosted on imgur. Potentially focusing efforts on areas like forum events (eg. the advent calendar) and the main art threads would mean we could prevent major losses without working people to the bone (I'm studying and also just got a new casual job, and I know most other people here are also doing other things with their lives).
Keep Looking:
Right now I'm concentrating on backing up all the images from the chapter break fillers, since that was an event I used to run and it's a pretty focused area for me to start with.
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