No more IMG tags?

[glitch]

Looks like BBCode IMG tags are off. What's up with that?

[GARTHWILSON]

There were too many image links that were going dead, whether from Imgur, Imageshack, Photobucket, sites that disappeared, manufacturers' sites that were getting re-arranged, etc.; so with storage plenty cheap now, Mike is making it so all images have to be attached. I think he'll make it so when he's done, you can go back to linking to images again but it will download a copy and convert it to an attachment automatically. We're searching for archived copies or possible replacements for hundreds that no longer are where they started out.

[Mike Naberezny]

glitch wrote:

Looks like BBCode IMG tags are off. What's up with that?

The IMG tag has been disabled because of the following two problems:

The first problem is, as Garth said, that a large number of external image links are now broken. Out of about 2,500 images posted with the IMG tag, nearly half are 404. I have been working on retrieving these lost images, both by using archive.org and contacting the original posters. We are down to about 500 broken images. There's still hope to recover more but hundreds will probably be lost in the end. That is unfortunate, especially on this forum, where a lot of the images are things like schematics and timing diagrams that the posts don't make sense without.

The second problem is the external images cause browsers to show mixed content warnings when the forum is served on HTTPS because many of the image links are HTTP. We want to have HTTPS but we also don't want users to see security warnings. We can either run one of the image proxy servers for this purpose or move the images to be hosted on 6502.org itself. Instead of adding more moving parts to the website, we are going to host the images directly on 6502.org so they can be served on HTTPS. The forum software doesn't have an option to restrict IMG tags to HTTPS only. Even if it did, we'd still have the first problem.

GARTHWILSON wrote:

I think he'll make it so when he's done, you can go back to linking to images again but it will download a copy and convert it to an attachment automatically.

I've already downloaded all the images from the historical posts using a combination of some software I wrote and manual work. However, this is only for the HTTPS migration effort. There are no plans to turn the IMG tag back on. I realize this may be an inconvenience to some users who like to use the photo-sharing websites. However, clawing the images back from the photo-sharing services on an ongoing basis is a burden. The server resources, time, and effort are all better spent improving other parts of the website. Please use the attachments feature to add images to posts.