XF 1.3's Link and Image Proxy System - Why is it useful to you?

Teapot

Teapot

Well-known member
Just out of curiosity, I've never had access to such a feature before so I'm not wholly sure what the practical uses wind up being.

So the question is, what benefits does/will it serve to you, on your forums? What problems might it solve?
 
Helps you keep a track of which links are being posted.

Helps prevent users IMG replacing for spam purposes

Makes your site less dependent on other sites - if images are removed from other sites your threads are not rendered useless.

Makes your site appear to load faster
 
The biggest thing for me is because Google can throw up an unsafe warning if someone visits your site, but it had an image embedded from a site that was flagged as malware at some point.

Basically a user can get this message because of something a third party domain did (and you have an image from that domain embedded):

upload_2014-1-9_12-40-49-png.64552
 
Razasharp said:
Helps prevent users IMG replacing for spam purposes

Makes your site less dependent on other sites - if images are removed from other sites your threads are not rendered useless.
Click to expand...

Can you keep thousands of those images cheaply on your server for years?
 
I'm glad XenForo is starting to include features such as this but for now I'm going to stick with @digitalpoint's Image Proxy as I prefer his implementation (as long as it works with 1.3).
 
BamaStangGuy said:
Does the link tool mess with Skimlinks?
Click to expand...
Martok said:
I'd like the answer to this but for Viglink.
Click to expand...
I expect no impact. Both Skim and Vig work by using client/browser javascript to modify, at the browser, the content sent to you by taking keywords and changing them to their links.
The Xf proxy is server based, operating prior to the server sending content to your browser. So they keywords presented to your browser are still the same, allowing Skim/Vig to then modify the text and turn it into hyperlinks
 
Mouth said:
I expect no impact. Both Skim and Vig work by using client/browser javascript to modify, at the browser, the content sent to you by taking keywords and changing them to their links.
The Xf proxy is server based, operating prior to the server sending content to your browser. So they keywords presented to your browser are still the same, allowing Skim/Vig to then modify the text and turn it into hyperlinks
Click to expand...
Correct, the code turns the words into links right at the end of the page rendering, so there are no actual links in the message that XF interacts with.
I've had no issues with Skimlinks on my site since enabling the Link Proxy
 
XF's link proxy is JS based as well, so it really depends the technique each takes and if they run on click (or the like), what runs first. They are both doing very similar things so I suspect they will interfere.
 
So with image proxy, remote images are actually moved to and served from the local server?
Cool. This gets rid of another addon (Convert Image)
 
Mouth said:
I expect no impact. Both Skim and Vig work by using client/browser javascript to modify, at the browser, the content sent to you by taking keywords and changing them to their links.
The Xf proxy is server based, operating prior to the server sending content to your browser. So they keywords presented to your browser are still the same, allowing Skim/Vig to then modify the text and turn it into hyperlinks
Click to expand...
MattW said:
Correct, the code turns the words into links right at the end of the page rendering, so there are no actual links in the message that XF interacts with.
I've had no issues with Skimlinks on my site since enabling the Link Proxy
Click to expand...
I'm not using the keywords feature of Viglink. I'm just using the link conversion for any links posted on my site. Any idea if this is affected? Anyone tried this yet with the proxy system on 1.3?
 
I really want to use the image proxy feature to prevent malware warnings and broken images links, but I have a very active community which posts a lot of large images. Many users are using post attachments, but even more are still posting content hosted at Flickr, Photobucket, etc.

Disk space is a big concern for me (What happens when I start pushing 2TB? Things are about to get expensive...), but bandwidth is another. My site pushes around 20-40Mbps right now, and I'm already flirting with the monthly overage limits of my hosting provider. I really have no way of predicting what the total usage would be if off-site, hot-linked images were included; it could be well over 100Mbps at peak load, and there's no real way to estimate this without testing it.

And I'm not sure about the image SEO implications either. Has anyone talked about that yet?

Anyways, I would still definitely recommend the image proxy for smaller/new forums. The link proxy I'm not quite so sure about, but it is a good option to have.
 
If I convert a forum to XF and have the proxy enabled, will all the existing linked files be transferred locally?
 
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