Because we've lost over a million historical images linked to our site over the 15 years we've been around, including some that were so popular in our early days we still regularly get complains and requests to "fix" them. We're tired of relying on random external image hosts that our members use for various reasons, that then change policies and delete the images over time, causing our member's comics and screenshot runs to be lost forever, often without the original author's knowledge. And don't get me started on the number of people who still think Discord is a good place to host images with the current 24 hour limit on their URLs, that's a whole other restoration project we need to get moving on before they start purging images for good there too...And frankly I personally am just sick of seeing
this all over the forum when I browse old threads:
View attachment 320204
Now, we can't bring back the vast majority of broken links that already exist, but we can make absolutely sure that we don't allow the number of broken images to grow any longer. We've tried alternative methods to force users to use the attachment system but got major pushback because the interface is so clunky to use when people are trying to insert 100+ images into their posts and need to manage them. And the media gallery is not well-liked either, so we have hundreds of members that are trying to get around that because it's more efficient to use something like imgbb or whatever they are used to.
Our only remaining option that we're aware of is the proxy image cache. So yeah, we're not treating it as a cache. We're treating it as the only way to preserve as much of our site as possible and safeguard against link rot. And that
is an intended use case for the cache, the options menu specifically calls out how to use the cache to protect against link rot by setting a refresh time when images are retained indefinitely:
View attachment 320201
Fun note there, if you use the cache refresh time instead of also disabling it, when your image hosts replace the original images with a stock "this image can't be found" piece instead,
it doesn't protect against that and we still lose the image. So that and the proxy lifetime are both set to zero now. We learned to set them the hard way. But I digress...
If we're not supposed to use it this way, why would they tell us to do it? Our members have been asking us for recommendations on an image host that will truly retain their work indefinitely. We don't know of one, because any time we've suggested one in the past it seems the terms always change, and then we're ultimately responsible (due to making the recommendation) when (not if) something breaks. If we're going to own that anyway, we'd better handle it and host it ourselves.
If you do have a better option, please tell us, because this is all we know how to do in a way that will work within our budget.
EDIT: Oh, we've also tried Andy's convert image and convert image all addons to automatically convert linked images to attachments but there were too many bugs and edge cases where it actually destroyed some of our posts and I had to restore them from a SQL backup manually, we can't rely on it. I'm grateful for his addon collection but it seems his code in these in particular just isn't well-suited for our needs, so after several months trying to make it work (all the while link rot still occurring...) we were forced to remove that as well. Nothing we try does the job we need it to do. And, honestly, what's the difference between us loading it through an "attachments" bucket in R2 vs a "proxy" bucket in R2? Same resources, same CDN, same fetch times, same storage and transaction pricing...Am I missing something?
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