Missing images on forum posts

[pauloney]

Has any effort being made to restore the images deposited along the years with ImageShack for the Forums?

I am trying, for example, to read:

viewtopic.php?t=11726

but it is literally impossible to follow the discussion without the images.

When their policy changed and the images became unavailable they promised to restore any that were used in forums, but that would have required someone to make a list and pass it over to them.

Thanks in advance

[fmw42]

IM does not host images nor are they affiliated with HostShack. So you would need to contact the author of the post to see about the images. Each user may use whatever resources they have or any free hosting service to provide URLs to separately stored images.

[pauloney]

Fred,

It is not just the author of the post - a thread, that one may be interested in, may have dozen of authors, several of those posting may contain files that have been long discarded by the authors. Why not do something that is slightly better - to ask ImageShack to have all specific images of our forums restored? I this way the postings would be readable and users will have a better experience.

I could do it myself as a contribution, but I'll need a dump of the forum-content, that I do not see at the repository for the web-site in GitLab.

Paulo Ney

[Bonzo]

The only way I can see to prevent the images disappearing is to host them on this forum. In this day and age I do not think it would be that expensive to do.

I would guess most old images are lost forever as the user will probably have deleted them if they are not still shown.

At least the idiots have been prevented from deleting their old posts now; which made a lot of threads unreadable.

You could try running the code snippets and see what they produce.

[pauloney]

Yeahhh, except that a lot of code snippet results depend on initial images to begin with ... and as the say goes "an image is worth a thousand words... "

I have no intention to address ALL of them - some are indeed lost forever, but some, like ImageShack, promise a restoration of the images upon request and that would be not so hard to do. I could write a script to look for redirections and 404 on image URL's and prepare the requests, but for that I would need a dump of the forum content. GitLab has IM web-site, but not the Forum content, and I have not been able to find it on the GitHub depository.

[fmw42]

In my opinion, I think this is really a lost cause. Unless Imagemagick either hosts the images or arranges to have some other hosting service host them (like on stackoverflow), Imagemagick would have to arrange with every hosting service to preserve the images and with all users who host their own images from their own servers or web sites. Someone might want an image that was not hosted by ImageShack that has been lost.