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An Important Notice Regarding Imgur

Like, I have an imgur account myself and majority of my scans are on my account, but still, in a situation where you need multiple scans arranged in a neatly-fashioned order, you can't have that with Fandom. At all.
 
If Fandom grab us by the balls and implement similar draconian restrictions, we as a wiki are finished.
 
I just learned about this issue elsewhere. I'm glad to see a thread has already been made for it.

So, first, let's not panic. This absolutely creates complications for our profiles, but this isn't a wiki destroying event - even if we failed to replace our imgur links that weren't tied to user accounts for scans, there is often enough context surrounding a scan that replacing the scan should not be impossible. This isn't to say that this won't be a problem, but it won't be an unmanageable problem.

That being said, we should put our panic aside and do what we can to download and replace our imgur links ASAP. We've been given prior warning about this, so we should fix the complications before they arrive. Is there any way of scanning profile source codes for key-words, like "imgur"? If there is, we could use that to identify and separate imgur links on profiles from other links. I don't know if we have a way of knowing for sure if an imgur link is attached to an imgur profile or not, which may make it a bit difficult to separate what links need to be replaced from what links do not need to be replaced, but it's a start.
 
catbox.moe is a really simple alternative that doesn't require an account and isn't run by a big corpo so it probably won't get nuked anytime soon. You can upload galleries with it too but it's a little different to imgur. I don't know of any other possible suggestions tbf, Imgur's shooting itself in the foot here.
 
I just use Gyazo nowadays. Though, based on what I read above, if someone has an account, that should allow them to use Imgur, no?
 
Rikimarox2 said:
I just use Gyazo nowadays. Though, based on what I read above, if someone has an account, that should allow them to use Imgur, no?
Click to expand...
Yup! Imgur itself isn't really an issue, it's more a preservation thing for existing imgur links. I know in like all my calc posts I just put them on there without an account, so they'd get nuked.
 
First_Witch said:
Its kinda shocking that we allow Imgur links as scans on our profiles in the first place to be honest. As much as I hate its guts and the people who programmed it, Fandom has a inhouse image system that should be used to house scans, thats just the proper procedure.

But I get it, Imgur is far more convenient and that is getting threatened by their springcleaning tendencies. Its unreasonable to expect the userbase to make Imgur accounts just to use Imgur as usual. We should probably outlaw external sites when it comes to our profiles in general at this point.
Click to expand...
This may not be a bad idea actually.

Anyway, I have highlighted this thread, and will create a popup message as well.
 
Antvasima said:
This may not be a bad idea actually.
Click to expand...
FANDOM has a 10mb file size limit for uploads. While this may be manageable for static images, many profiles use gifs for scans, as communicating the reference properly with a link to a single image would be infeasible. Compressing a gif down to less than 10mb isn't always possible while keeping the information in the gif intact and passable.

While uploading scans to FANDOM directly may prevent cases like this in the future, it can't realistically be done for every scan. If FANDOM's image hosting service was good enough to put all of our scans on it, nobody would've put scans on imgur in the first place.
 
Yeah I don't have time to fix the thousands of imgur scans I've got on pages, so I'm just gonna hope that they've got enough views to not be considered unused/inactive, and use an Imgur account in the future.

For catbox.moe, I initially used a similar alternative, mixtape.moe, that was active for years upon years before being shutdown. Alternatives like this are not safe either.

Honestly, the biggest players are usually the safest, and that's been imgur. So them running into troubles doesn't mean that less popular alternatives are actually safer.
 
DarkGrath said:
I just learned about this issue elsewhere. I'm glad to see a thread has already been made for it.
Click to expand...
I disagree. PANIC IMMEDIATELY.

But anyway, moving past that, if the bot automation stuff is correct, then Imgur may completely cease being a viable option. I've sent images before on Discord to friends that have explicit content moderation turned on (as in, Discord automatically preventing what it considers explicit content from being messaged to them directly), and said images have been ludicrously inoffensive. So if Imgur's AI scrubbers are similar or perhaps worse at telling such content apart, that's a good chunk of our scans prevented from being uploaded outright.
 
DarkGrath said:
FANDOM has a 10mb file size limit for uploads. While this may be manageable for static images, many profiles use gifs for scans, as communicating the reference properly with a link to a single image would be infeasible. Compressing a gif down to less than 10mb isn't always possible while keeping the information in the gif intact and passable.

While uploading scans to FANDOM directly may prevent cases like this in the future, it can't realistically be done for every scan. If FANDOM's image hosting service was good enough to put all of our scans on it, nobody would've put scans on imgur in the first place.
Click to expand...
Yes, and I do not think that Fandom technically allows uploading many entire pages of copyrighted comic book stories directly to their site, so Imgur combined with increasingly using references instead seems like our least bad option.

I am very open for better suggestions though. 🙏
 
Well, I definitely appreciate this issue being treated much more seriously than it was last night.

I've seen a number of people use Gyazo for their scans; Could this work? I've never used it myself so I'm unsure.

Also, would it be possible to make a list of every page containing imgur links? Having an organized approach like that would probably prevent a lot of pages from being affected.
 
I think that A.I. bots cleaning away sexual content is unavoidable no matter which image hosting archive that you use, and the smaller ones may go broke and shut down after a while. However, whether they will also remove inactive content uploaded without accounts is unknown as of yet.
 
I signed up Imgur with my gmail and Facebook account. Will I be safe? Because I'm not gonna re-upload thousands of Demonbane scans due to Imgur being Tumblr no.2.
 
Antvasima said:
I think that A.I. bots cleaning away sexual content is unavoidable no matter which image hosting archive that you use, and the smaller ones may go broke and shut down after a while. However, whether they will also remove inactive content uploaded without accounts is unknown as of yet.
Click to expand...
Which is why I suggested Gyazo, as I do not think it uses AI moderation like that, and it seems to have been a reliable site for a long time now. I am obviously open to alternatives, but my point is that Imgur as it is now is not really sustainable.
 
Damage3245 said:
This just goes to show that using references is going to become a lot more necessary and commonplace on our profiles.
Click to expand...
I extremely strongly agree with this. Please take note of this everybody. 🙏
 
My idea would be to only allow Imgur links when they are necessary (Huge galleries of scans, sequences from movies etc) and have those links be backed up by the wayback machine. Even if the link goes dead you would still be able to fish scans back with it.
 
This thread has been enlightening. The amount of you not using an Imgur account whilst still using Imgur is incredible.

As for making rules about using alternatives, by and large we don't have a guarantee of safety with anything except Fandom, and Fandom is frankly garbage for mass-uploading scans (for reference, my recent Rakshasa page has nearly 70 scans used). I don't think we're under immediate threat of scan loss for those who haven't been avoiding an Imgur profile, I don't think we need a rule. Notifying people is important though, for sure, and notifying people that it may be wise to switch if they have concerns about this.

As said, our reference system makes us less immediately dependent upon scans for new profiles, too. It's good we made the switch.
 
Compress and make back ups.
Don't get overtly attached to third party sites over convenience.
Use references.
The only time I ever used Imgur here was a DCAU Luthoriac scan. Not worth it to me personally to lose sleep over a dead verse missing scans.
 
Well, this is a ******* dogshit situation to wake up to.

Off-site on a different wiki I have several huge bastard profiles, each with hundreds of Imgur links and not one of them is linked to an account. The biggest one being this giant **** off composite Slappy profile that is nearly 250k bytes with nearly 500 Imgur links (exactly 499 the last time I searched "Imgur" in the profile).

As to be expected, I'm rapidly replacing Imgur pictures with an Imgur account that was slapped together in three minutes, and its now no longer letting me post images....**** you Imgur.
 
Hell, it might not even be worth it since Imgur just randomly deletes shit. Unironically, between Goosebumps (A kid's horror novel series that isn't really problematic outside of a few cases) and Pumpkin Night (A stupidly gorey manga just full of blood and text that sounds like something torn from a 4Chan board), more Goosebumps scans have been deleted over the course of my time on Imgur.

Edit: Only Goosebumps scans from the looks of things..
 
Yeah tbh

I don't even feel comfortable giving Imgur a chance after this. An update for a site like this is usually a death knell for them, and it'd be deserved in this case. Best to let them rot and find an alternative.
 
How can they even tell that the image in question is "unused"? Like, are they aware of us or something?

This is just braindead in so many ways.
 
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