New article is up about the recent Imgur announcement, TLDR some guides or forum posts with embedded images on SRC may be affected.
https://www.speedrun.com/news/906-2023-4-25-imgur-is-deleting-all-old-content-not-tied-to-an-account
Also, if you believe there is another service you would recommend over the ones I’ve put in the article here - please let me know :) We can open a discussion about what best alternatives there are, and perhaps I’ll make some edits to the article.
these websites can also be used as imgur alternative https://photos.google.com (google photos) https://drive.google.com (google drive) https://ibb.co (ImgBB) https://prnt.sc (lightshot's website) https://gyazo.com (gyazo)
Even tho discord is a great service for hosting images (I do it frequently), it might not be a good choice in the long term. Since Discord main goal is not hosting images, we might face the same problem in the future. For permanent hosting with no worries, I'd opt for something like Google Photos or other services like 🪙4 mentioned.
I don't understand why SRC has to rely so much on third party services for this and there is no direct upload to the site for pictures in guides and posts yet? We can already directly upload pictures to the site for profile pictures and things for themes. What is the difference with not having it available for guides and posts? Elo hosts multiple sites. Surely they have the capacity available to allow pictures to be stored on SRC directly for guides and posts. Why not limit it strictly to .jpegs and a file maximum for example..
Some of these third party providers mentioned in the above post are quite unclear in their image deletion policies. Gyazo for example states "should be extremely reliable long-term", others say "unlimited" but remember that these TOS are all subject to change. These can all end like imgur at some point.
@Daravae Aside from potential storage costs, there are also some moderation/legal concerns surrounding potentially inappropriate content. Of course, this is a concern regardless of whether it's an embedded image or one that we host ourselves - but the legal burden increases significantly if we host the content ourselves.
With that said, I just spoke to @Camcorder about this and he confirmed we will be adding support for image hosting for guides (alongside other improvements) in upcoming updates!
[quote] Aside from potential storage costs, there are also some moderation/legal concerns surrounding potentially inappropriate content. [/quote]
Forum mods?
That's a step in the right direction. Thanks.
Elo already uses blob storage for the pictures used in News posts.. but then storage is suddenly an issue for pictures in guides and posts? Why not just use blob storage for user and theme assets? It's insanely scalable and with hot/cool tiers, it can be used very efficiently if thought out properly.
Speaking of which, if 'potential storage costs' are really too much (how exactly?) then I think Elo should first review how they prioritize and handle image uploads to the site first. Why not look into making changes into that system first?
Let's talk about that for a minute. A portion of storage is dedicated solely to backgrounds used in both leaderboard and user profile themes and for profile pictures which, as good as they look, are still just aesthetics. Why are there no resources being allocated as part of storing important info, like pictures for guides/posts? The site needs to prioritize where it allocates its resources to. Right now it just sounds like we'd fancy good looking pfps and background over having pictures in important guides and posts.
For example, you can still upload .png's to every part of the site.. Why? Apart from transparency, they can grow significantly larger in size than .jpeg's. Why not convert all of them to .jpeg and restrict the site to have backgrounds and pfps use jpegs? Then keep the SRC transparent logo and badges and other very small stuff to use transparency only. Why is a 400x400 profile picture only being displayed in 100x100 on the forums? What point is there to upload a 400x400 pfp then? Elo should really think about where they can optimize their existing resources better on this site.
Right now, users are SPOF's when creating guides or posts using linked images. If one user deletes their account from an external site used to upload and link images from on to SRC, that content is potentially entirely gone, depending on where they uploaded and what the image deletion policy of that site is. That is bad and shouldn't be possible.
Then there is the legality. I'm not a lawyer so I don't know the ins and outs of that stuff, but I do know that the site already allow uploads of pfps and backgrounds, and with that, there's already always a chance of potential inappropriate content. So with that: The site is already carrying the legal burden of what content is being uploaded. So why would that be different for images in posts/guides compared to pfps and backgrounds? The only difference would be that it would be additional moderation, but generally speaking, the site is growing and should get better equipped with the proper tools to deal with this kinda stuff rather than have humans moderate this content. Something that has been an issue ever since the site exists.
[quote]Why not convert all of them to .jpeg and restrict the site to have backgrounds and pfps use jpegs?[/quote]
Are you really proposing that they make the site worse on purpose? I get where you're coming from with optimizing existing resource usage but you're kinda going off the rails here, and they already said that they're gonna do what you want them to do despite the concerns lol
Why is a 400x400 profile picture only being displayed in 100x100 on the forums? Reminder that the username badge of @1 is a 480x480px 1.3MB large gif that is displayed at 14x14 or 18x18px.
tbh, why not transcode all uploaded images to webp? According to caniuse it's supported by 97.03% of users and it offers better compression and has all the features of jpeg, png and gif. Transcoding also ensures that the images are efficiently compressed, metadata is stripped and you can create differently sized versions along the way. If elo is worried about the processing costs, just do it client side like many other platforms. @1's username badge resized to 18x18px and then converted to webp only takes up 6 KiB and looks exactly the same.