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Posted Image
Topic Started: Mar 1 2017, 10:04 PM (431 Views)
Gooper Blooper
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In two weeks, all Dropbox public links break, because Dropbox is run by shitheads who don't understand the concept of preservation. I have been attempting to find a workaround to the problem of four years of RP being stripped of many of its' images, and the last thing I've come up with involves the forum's filters, with the aim of making all often-used DB links filter into links to the Imgur or Cloudinary versions of the same image. However, the board software is unable to find the filtered phrase if it's in an embedded image.

To that end, I have temporarily disabled the image tag on the forum to see if that could help. Unfortunately, posts made before the disabling of image tags still display images (if you edit a post, however, that will make the image tag ban take effect). In hopes that the forum "refreshes" itself every so often (this is how the forum search works), I'm going to leave images off for a couple days to see if that will retroactively allow for the filters to work.

If this doesn't work, nothing will, and our previous seasons will be a carnival of "Posted Image", but at least it's not my fault.

BELATED EDIT: Images were re-enabled last week after failing to affect old posts. Apologies to those of you reading old RP this offseason, but Dropbox feels like casually destroying chunks of the Internet.
Edited by Gooper Blooper, Mar 11 2017, 10:03 AM.
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Gooper Blooper
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All public links are now dead. If your avatar has vanished, that's because it was hosted in my Dropbox.

Here is a list of topics that were affected by the Dropbocalypse. Over the course of the summer, Chao plans to fix the larger threads. I will be handling the smaller ones. This list will be updated as topics are repaired.

Recovered From Dropbocalypse
The Artchive
Ask The Characters Questions
Big Bar Brawl 3
Big Bar Brawl 4
Character Profiles
The Kingdom Of Orvance
Twisted Metal
The Consolation Brawl
Fite Yer Mates Season 3
The Complete GB Ensemble
Big Bar Brawl 6
Big Bar Brawl 5
Fite Club/BBP Season 4
Royal Rumble Season 3
Royal Rumble Season 4
Royal Rumble Season 5
Drown Yer Mates 6
Drown Yer Mates 5
Drown Yer Mates 4
Fite Club/BBP Season 5
Fite Club/BBP Season 6
Fite Yer Mates Season 6
Fite Yer Mates Season 5
Fite Yer Mates Season 4
ZFS King of Beasts
Serious RP Season 3
Casual RP Season 4
Serious RP Season 4
Casual RP Season 5
Casual RP Season 6
Serious RP Season 6
Serious RP Season 5

Not Fully Recovered

Lowest Priority/May Never Recover
Dangerously Genre Savvy (my Blogger blog)
RP Planning and Discussion Seasons 3 and 4
RP Planning and Discussion Seasons 5 and 6
Edited by The Ruby Chao, Jul 4 2018, 01:47 AM.
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jumpropeman
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Which way to the baby war?
THE SEQUEL NO ONE ASKED FOR!

Image hosting sites are totally bogus this year, and the already touchy photobucket has decided to put up a ridiculous paywall of 400 dollars in order to share your images on other websites!

Thankfully, your mods are insane. I at least intend to undertake the process of cleaning up most of the old photobucket links on the forum and rehost the images elsewhere to preserve our history.

The users affected by this include: Jumpropeman, M Sheep, Brinehammer, and Draco mostly, plus anyone who has borrowed our images or folks like Ven who post from a wide variety of sources. Please keep your photobuckets public so I can download your old images and replace them! I probably won't do a RECOVERED FROM PHOTOBUCKALYPSE table until the project kicks of in earnest, but until then, DO NOT POST ANY PHOTOBUCKET IMAGES, no matter how handsome they are! No one will see them.
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jumpropeman
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Which way to the baby war?
Ah sugar, silly me! Probably should post a list of alternatives for image hosting as well!

Gonna post them in reverse order of how I'd recommend them, but these all come recommended highly, just on a different scale.

IMGUR
Imgur is probably the most popular image hosting site and the one most of you will migrate too. I use it occasionally myself, but over the past year or so its beginning to have Ambitions, which is what killed Photobucket and Dropbox for us. Imgur will probably be reliable for quite a while, but we might be back here in five years scrambling around again if they push too hard into their strange goal of being a social platform rather than just an image site.

CLOUDINARY
My current go-to image hoster, mostly for how frank they are about how they want your money. Their goal is to snag websites and businesses though, so for a single forum it seems like a safe bet, but if you intend to share your images all around the internet I'd recommend something else. The free account gives you quite a bit of wiggle room and, as far as I can tell, if you have multiple e-mails you can make multiple accounts with impunity. I wager I'm the only one who might ever hit its caps though due to Big Bar Brawl art and the like, even though after today I'm still nowhere near full.

BLOGGER
Backed up by the big Google itself, Blogger only loses to our top spot because of the convoluted method involved in image hosting, as well as the mysterious possibility of hidden restrictions. However, if Blogger itself ever tanks we'd have bigger worries, so image hosting there is strange, but possible. I already use it for some images myself, but I haven't investigated if there is any way to link them without posting them in a blog. Some kooky experimentation may allow you to host tons of images on your blog and link them freely and safely on the forum.

DEVIANTART
The most reliable but most picky I imagine. Deviantart's whole thing is about its art so I feel they know they can't disable hyperlinking, although Ven probably knows their history better. The only thing is you probably don't want to put too many licensed images on it, but for folks like me, Gooper Blooper, or Dudemanguy who often make our own art, it's likely the best bet for a permanent working image.

I've looked at many other image hosting sites back during dropbocalypse, and these, I feel, are the only ones worth mentioning.

I guess you can also do that Upload function in the Zoofights RP forum but its gross.
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The Ruby Chao
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Bree requested I post some of her thoughts here since she can't post in this forum.

Bree
 
I am not an admin, but I’d like to weigh in on the topic of DeviantART because I feel it’s important.

Unlike Jumpropeman’s other suggestions, DeviantART is designed specifically for artists, a community where they can showcase their art and receive feedback or take commissions. Because of this, DeviantART requires us to consider some things that aren’t necessary with the other sites.

Firstly, do not post borrowed art on DeviantART without crediting the artist. Some of our users, such as Cornwind, do not bother to find out the original creator of an image and sometimes even crop out artists’ signatures and watermarks. This is considered to be extremely disrespectful and should not be done on DeviantART. You will earn the ire of the community, and risk upsetting the original artist and/or facing disciplinary action from the site’s mods. Art thieves run rampant on DeviantART; while a genuine art thief will usually try to claim the artist’s work as their own, this is not always the case, and using an image without credit or permission is generally seen as dishonest regardless of your intention.

Also, if the original creator has already uploaded the image to DeviantART, please hyperlink the image from their gallery rather than re-uploading the image to yours.

If you are unable to determine the creator of the image, please include a disclaimer stating that it is not yours when you upload it to DA. All of this may seem a hassle to some of you, but Gooper Blooper, Jumpropeman, and DudeManGuy can tell you that creating art is a labor of love, and artists deserve to have their hard work acknowledged and their intellectual/creative property respected. There are many people on the Internet who exploit artists by stealing art, not paying for commissions they received, and other generally dickish behavior. It’s important to me that we all try to be as considerate of others, even Internet strangers, as we possibly can.

Secondly, if you choose to upload art on DA, I highly recommend that you make your gallery public to all (or only to friends, and friend other ZFRP members who are on DA). This way, if another user desires to use one of your images, they are able to go and get it themselves easily. This applies especially to art that is done for another ZFRP user, like my beloved GIF of Amity. There is a way to hide specific images from displaying in the gallery rather than needing to hide the entire gallery; I will poke around and find out how this is done in case anyone wants to know. That way users can hide images that may contain spoilers for upcoming plots and whatnot.
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Gooper Blooper
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Positive developments from the world of image hosting? Perish the thought!

1: Cloudinary's free storage has increased, making it a better option than ever for image hosting. They are still very much business-oriented, but for small forum use we should fly under their radar.

2: This Firefox add-on fixes embedded Photobucket images! I've just tried it myself and it works perfectly! There is also a partner addon for Chrome I can't test since I don't have Chrome. These addons may break at some point if PB is able to beat them, but for now you can view all PB embeds just fine. It also allows you to view images when people link to PB's own site, so we can finally see what that one M Sheep mutant linked in this post looked like.
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The Ruby Chao
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As a chrome user, I can confirm this works and we'll be able to survive until the offseason and JRM's Great Updating Project with old images from photobucket visible for now!
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jumpropeman
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Which way to the baby war?
As I begin the restore project, I tried to use these plugins in both Firefox and Chrome and they didn't seem to be helping.

However, after a change in management, most of photobucket no longer needs recovering! It might have issues again some day but I've said a bunch of pictures to my computers, am looking into the means to back up the forum entirely, and have already replaced potential problem images like Marduk's photobucket since that will be hard to recover if things get dicey again.

EDIT: here are images from Gooper's stuff I can't recover:
http://w11.zetaboards.com/Strange_Worlds_RP/single/?p=8083804&t=8763473
http://w11.zetaboards.com/Strange_Worlds_RP/single/?p=8089815&t=8885013
http://w11.zetaboards.com/Strange_Worlds_RP/single/?p=8149342&t=9810133
http://w11.zetaboards.com/Strange_Worlds_RP/single/?p=8135003&t=8763473
http://w11.zetaboards.com/Strange_Worlds_RP/single/?p=8221912&t=10229720
http://w11.zetaboards.com/Strange_Worlds_RP/single/?p=8221855&t=10229720
Edited by jumpropeman, May 23 2018, 04:25 AM.
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Gooper Blooper
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Doesn't work for me either. That's odd. The extensions still work for other stuff (checked the BBB5 thread to compare).

I have no idea what that image used to be. If Brine can't hook you up with the original, you may have to just erase the link and move on - I have found in some of my dropbox-fixing posts that some missing images were never really necessary in the first place, and can sometimes simply be removed without the post suffering for it.
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Gooper Blooper
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Important note: While Photobucket has temporarily "released the hostages", please be aware that it's only doing so for a limited time before taking them all behind a paywall again, because they still don't offer a free hosting plan that allows hotlinking.
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The Ruby Chao
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At long last, the Dropboxpocalypse has been cured. All broken images in the RP threads should be fixed now.

If you find any broken images, please PM me or Jumpropeman to fix them.

And by that I mean just me until post-BBB8.
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