Kolya on 30/6/2007 at 15:39
I wonder, will we ever see an image upload function?
Before you cringe in pain...
It could resize pics to a sufficiently small size.
Pics could only be hosted for some time.
Or maybe you could hack something to abuse imageshack. :thumb:
Why not?
SD on 30/6/2007 at 15:55
Pointless and terrible idea given that there are so many free image hosting sites.
Gingerbread Man on 30/6/2007 at 16:44
Most of which suck the ball, though.
Honestly, the problem is the obvious one: Server space and bandwidth. We're not co-located or anything, the entire thing is run by Saam.
Something I could see would be making a very limited image hosting thing available only to members with either a certain postcount or a certain duration of membership -- trouble is that the former leads to spamming and the latter is gruesomely unfair unless it's a particularly short duration (in which case it's a bit of a nothing prerequisite).
And even if that was discovered to be an amazingly economic approach, I don't think we'd do it anyway.
It'd be really nice if we could do something along the lines of WaffleImages (exposition: WaffleImages is a service created by members at Something Awful, and it only allows the uploaded images to be embedded on those forums... I think it's some multi-mirror affair so that the bandwidth gets spread around, but I wouldn't have the faintest idea how to go about it. If anyone wants to pick up that particular torch, it'd be awesome.
With a WaffleImages-style "TTLG Forum Only" thing, we could reduce the bandwidth concerns -- since a lot of the increase would come from people hotlinking images from TTLG's servers on other forums :mad: -- as well as having something hopefully more predictable and stable than photobucket, imageshack, and whatever other red-x eighty-second-hang-time bastard "services" I've temporarily forgotten the name of.
Long story short, I can't see it happening. But I'd love it if we could come together and work out a WaffleImages style system.
Nameless Voice on 30/6/2007 at 17:20
If TTLG were to implement such a service, I would suggest an option to automatically gamma-adjust uploaded images, as well as the resizing option Kolya mentioned.
Limiting the service to those with a high post count or long duration would defeat some of the purpose, since the long time members are usually the ones who know how to brighten, resize and upload images themselves. Admittedly, the other services which are around are, shall we say, less than reliable? (ImageShack in particular can be exceptionally slow to respond).
But on the other hand, they usually work eventually, and I don't generally consider any picture I'm posting to be so important that everyone needs to be able to see it quickly.
Kolya on 1/7/2007 at 15:01
It's fairly easy to protect from hotlinking with a mod rewrite in (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Htaccess#Prevent_hotlinking_of_images) htaccess. It relies on the correct referrer being sent, so it can be circumvented client side. But not by n00b_2000. I think it would suffice as a protection for pictures.
That distributed server stuff they do on (
http://waffleimages.com/) waffleimages looks a bit more intricate. But I'm not sure if we would even need that (in the beginning) as TTLG isn't quite as big as SA, is it? Finding one reliable server could be hard enough though.
