Modern Vespa

Aha.

Quick edit coming up...

That would be a more effective demonstration if:

You embedded it with img tags instead.

EDIT: Your edit beat me to it.

So a remembered stored image, when posted again, gets quoted.

In this case, yes, because the link is actually part of the message. And in most imagined implementations of inline photos, that would also be the case.

I'm going to strategically withdraw...

Uploads / attachments are actually closely tied to another change that I am thinking about: a replacement for the message editor. If you want to see one of the candidates, go take a look:

https://editorjs.io

Unfortunately, their main page won't load for me at home. But it works just fine at work. It's a promising editor, but the failure of their main website makes me somewhat... cautious.

Their website loaded just fine for me.

Looks promising if you have the time to explore it.

One thing that's odd, but not necessarily negative, is that each "thing" is a separate block. Each paragraph is a block, as is each image. Or table. Or list.

Not sure if that presents any challenges, either SMoP or a challenge to users.

I know about the Preview thing, I use it all the time. I'm a freak that way.

I was just thinking that it would be easy to show the HTML and allow the poster to decide placement and order. However, if it isn't easy and it's not broke, it doesn't need to be fixed.

I thought this might come up.

Pretty sure I've posted a couple of times over the years about how the server retains deleted attachments. I began to utilise it as a feature, and (same as swiss1939 describes) I've employed it in cases where I wanted inline images. Lots of my image posts display deleted attachments.

I don't mind fixing my images when the purge comes. I knew it might happen. Besides, my feeling is that users ought to be able to fully delete their uploads, and a regular purge of orphaned attachments takes us closer to that.

It happened to me too ...

I'm glad you mentioned it. I will proceed cautiously, then.

Sounds like what I'm going to have to do is compile a list of every inlined image included in a message, and cross reference that to the orphaned files list.

Here are a few more message editor candidates:

https://www.sceditor.com
https://wysibb.com
https://ckeditor.com/docs/ckeditor4/latest/examples/bbcode.html

I'm happy to tidy up my posts if they get broken

Update: I've got some custom code cobbled together to hunt down every single orphaned attachment and put it back in the database. There are 34,799 orphaned attachments, and they collectively occupy about 4.1gb of storage space. Of those, about 10% are actually referenced with inline image tags in a post.

My goal now is still to delete all the orphaned files that aren't referenced in any posts.

Wow, that's many more unattached inline images than I would have guessed. Must be a fairly large group of us utilising the hack?

I've spent pretty much the whole weekend writing and testing code, using a backup of the real database to rehearse the data ballet mosh pit. It seems high because it's completely wrong. I was conflating the numbers. Here are some better ones:

There are 34,792 orphaned attachments. Of those, 552 appear as inline image references somewhere in a public post, and therefore aren't truly orphans, as such. They will be spared.

The remaining 34,240 will most likely be deleted, as they are essentially inaccessible to the public. I have no way of knowing if any of those are being hotlinked from offsite, as we're not keeping any kind of traffic statistics on the images in the CDN. If they are being hotlinked from offsite, then, well, those are going to go dark shortly.

Not Auntie Bessie!

Thanks for finding and saving the old inline images and sorry for the bother. I'm not sure how many times I used that method to display pictures, could be 30 or so.

No worries! The forum software was improved in the process, so it’s all good.

WOW! Incredible improvements! If only you were into eBikes. There's NO other forum, regardless of focus, out there like this.

UPDATE: I've now removed 34,219 orphaned files from the server, and from the database as well.

I am reasonably confident that none of the orphaned files were referenced in any post anywhere on Modern Vespa. I think it's an open question as to whether they were externally linked or not.

Technically, at this moment, the files still exist. I've just moved them into a spot that can't be publicly accessed. I'll leave them there for a little while (on the off chance that I've effed something up) and then delete them permanently at some point in the future.

I still haven't written the code to purge all of the private message attachments, but there's still over a month before the deadline I've set.

I was going to say something really funny about teaming with Apple and using an AI system to match against a database of known image hashes, but it very quickly became less and less funny so I stopped.

Unrelated to PM changes, but can't find the bug reporting thread right now. Seems new threads created sometime in the past few days don't tally views anymore, despite having replies posted to the thread. Minor non-critical UI detail, but maybe its a symptom of something else more important broken?

Well spotted! There was indeed a problem with the background process that tabulates the view counts and updates the topics in the database. The worst part is that there were no error logs of the problem, so it was completely invisible until you observed the zero view counts.

I've fixed the problem. Not completely sure how many view counts we lost, or if we lost any -- the (now-working) view counter processed a large backlog of view counts, but if the problem had existed for more than a few days, the older records would be purged.

Thanks very much for bringing this to my attention.

Also, looks like I nuked one of your sig pictures, presumably because it was an orphan. Sorry about that.

我的注册不行了，这是为什么？

I registered not line, is this why?

I don't understand your question.

I finally figured out why their webpage won't load for me at home. The team that created it are Russian, and the editorjs.io website is hosted in Russia. Which is blocked on my home network.

Not entirely sure how I feel about that. It's a fine editor, but... not sure I want to open that particular can of worms.

I think caution is prudent in this case.

[Insert Soviet Coding Joke Here]

Just a friendly reminder: You now have about two weeks to retrieve any images attached to PMs. After that, they will be deleted from the server.

Bump.

Last chance to save any images in PMs.

One more day before PM Image Doomsday!

I agree wholeheartedly ...
On another note, I'm new, and just set up my account here, noticed that my "avatar" on each page is the wrong one AND it is clockwise 90* out of plumb.
The avatar that shows in all my posts/comments is the correct one ...
Can you guys get that fixed somehow ???

Thanks for such a great resource too.

It's showing up correctly for me:

But what if it was *meant* to be on its side?
Just, you know, spitballing here.

That is CLEARLY not supposed to be on it's side... like I said it is 90* clockwise out of plumb.
However, it is ALSO the wrong "avatar" ... should be the SAME as to the left here for my comments.