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[hummingbird]

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There are several old posts ruined by bad links to third party image hosting sites. Some times the discussion dwells on the details contained in the pics so much that the post/thread is useless after the pics go away.

I suggest you have some tool that senses a link to a third party pic hosting site, pulls the pic and hosts it on your site, so that it continues to be displayed as long as the post stays up.

[Piwoslaw]

Posting pics from third-party sites reduces the space needed on EM's servers, but also has the risk of broken links. Anything I believe is more or less important, and comes from another site, I would propose to download to your computer, then upload to EM either as an attachment or into your album. In some cases it's nice to give credits.

[MetroMPG]

Hummingbird, I agree it's a problem (images linked from other sites disappearing).

I'll check to see if there's an existing forum mod to do something like what you suggested.

Ideally: the server could fetch copies of all 3rd party linked images, and only serve them when it detects a missing image (though that would require a script to run periodically to go through the list of thousands to check them).

[Christ]

How about a server script that gathers the images as they're posted, and a link to report broken images, so the server can then replace the image with the local copy?

The only time I can see this not working out well is (probably never going to happen on this forum) someone posts images of something they're not supposed to (perhaps from another person's image hosting account) and that person moves/removes the image from their account so that it's not posted live anymore.

This, of course, could be fixed with the "report spam" button, or via email with the mods.

Regardless, it's probably better for the server's health if we just "report broken image". Probably easier to code, too.

[dcb]

event wise it could be fairly simple to get a local copy working, not saying it needs doing, I must be bored . But customizing the vbulletin save/modify event isn't for everyone.

user adds/modifies post:
for each img tag
  if img url is not em based (begins with http...ecomodder.com)
    convert url to filename (uuencode?) and add original extension.
    if file doesn't exist 
      get image data into local filesystem (socket read) using filename
      convert filename to EM url (i.e. add appropriate http:// prefix)
  use em url for img url

preview can use whatever url is in the message

also, might want to secure the em url path so only logged in users can see pics if bandwidth is an issue.