WARNING: Imgur plans to remove old images, starting May 15

N1KF · 2023-04-29 03:39:45

On April 19, 2023, Imgur posted this:

Imgur wrote:

Our new Terms of Service will go into effect on May 15, 2023. We will be focused on removing old, unused, and inactive content that is not tied to a user account from our platform well as [explicit content, etc.]. You will need to download/save any images that you wish to save if they no longer adhere to these Terms.

This suggests many images hosted on Imgur will be removed. Imgur has served as a very useful image host, with a long history of preserving images.

This impacts EE a lot because hundreds of old EE images, comics, and artwork are hosted on Imgur. Please see the Archiveteam's page on Imgur for more info on preservation efforts.

Posting this in Off-Topic because this has massive effects outside EE.

Kirby, St1ckS4m(EE)

Minimania · 2023-04-29 05:15:49

This is likely to destroy a lot of old graphics suggestions topics. Ill do my best to preserve what I can but I can't guarantee I get them all

N1KF

N1KF · 2023-04-29 07:05:50

Minimania wrote:

This is likely to destroy a lot of old graphics suggestions topics. Ill do my best to preserve what I can but I can't guarantee I get them all

If you're saving the URLs, it would be helpful to post a list. The Archiveteam is accepting lists of URLs to be archived.

To easily find Imgur links on the forums, you can just search "imgur" and sort by posts. I recommend setting your Display settings to show 150 posts at once.

Sections of URLs submitted to Archiveteam to be processed:

Forums
 1194 - https://transfer.archivete.am/meV2o/img … _items.txt - Game Business (1066 posts)
  204 - https://transfer.archivete.am/klz9Z/img … _items.txt - Forum Business (362 posts)
10287 - https://transfer.archivete.am/m6O1r/img … _items.txt - Game Discussion (10445 posts)
 7241 - https://transfer.archivete.am/L7Zau/img … _items.txt - Worlds (6224 posts)
 1741 - https://transfer.archivete.am/MAOhQ/img … _items.txt - World Creation (964 posts)
  938 - https://transfer.archivete.am/6cfP8/img … _items.txt - Questions and Answers (1089 posts)
 1040 - https://transfer.archivete.am/102WIu/im … _items.txt - Crews (1401 posts)
 3847 - https://transfer.archivete.am/s4iVf/img … _items.txt - Bots and Programming (642 posts)
 1922 - https://transfer.archivete.am/mAPde/img … _items.txt - Game Suggestions (1922 posts)
 5139 - https://transfer.archivete.am/3DMJK/img … _items.txt - Graphics Suggestions (6272 posts)
  370 - https://transfer.archivete.am/6RCr8/img … _items.txt - Campaign Suggestions (189 posts)
 1634 - https://transfer.archivete.am/2W0Yw/For … eports.txt - Bug Reports (1613 posts)
 1309 - https://transfer.archivete.am/MqYbF/img … _items.txt - Forum Discussion (1555 posts)
 4309 - https://transfer.archivete.am/pLcZr/img … _items.txt - Off-Topic (4884 posts)
 3651 - https://transfer.archivete.am/15VWJ2/im … _items.txt - Creative (2676 posts)
   95 - https://transfer.archivete.am/gzgiP/img … _items.txt - Debates
 3490 - https://transfer.archivete.am/pCyGA/img … -found.txt - Forum Games (5339 posts)
  455 - https://transfer.archivete.am/r2QOs/img … _items.txt - Compost Bin (632 posts)
Discord
   57 - https://transfer.archivete.am/tFquV/img … _items.txt - Everybody Edits!
   46 - https://transfer.archivete.am/KdjQz/img … _items.txt - Everybody Edits Offline
    4 - https://transfer.archivete.am/oUsRu/img … _items.txt - Smiley Face Game
Other
  989 - https://transfer.archivete.am/8L0SA/img … _items.txt - Fail Forums
 4525 - https://transfer.archivete.am/OYDyK/img … _items.txt - Different55's IRC logs
  133 - https://transfer.archivete.am/148Bxe/im … _items.txt - Benjaminsen's early EE Reddit post

edit: Apparently this data is still being processed by the Wayback Machine. Watch out for them!

Tomahawk, St1ckS4m(EE)

N1KF · 2023-04-30 04:34:19

I went through and submitted the instances of Imgur on the forums, plus a few other things. I also want to go through the Kongregate board and Nonoba archive, but those will probably take extra work to figure out.

I used this filter and copied the matches into a list, which unfortunately might have resulted in a few misspellings getting missed:

\S*imgur\S*

Minimania · 2023-04-30 05:59:30

GmFKj

yo what is going on how have I not seen this

St1ckS4m(EE)

Zoey2070 · 2023-04-30 16:56:49

this is so STUPID!!!!!!! we must ARCHIVE

LMK how to help

N1KF · 2023-05-01 03:59:18

Zoey2070 wrote:

this is so STUPID!!!!!!! we must ARCHIVE
LMK how to help

If you find new URLs to save, either message them to me, or do it yourself.

Do it yourself

Find Imgur URLs and use your browser's functionality to save the images. Preferably save the metadata too, as seemingly every image on Imgur has a page that appears if you don't include the image file extension.

Archiveteam: Send individual links

Go to the #imgone channel on hackint and write this:

!a [Imgur URL]

Archiveteam: Copy numerous links from one page

This is what I did to gather thousands of links off the EE forums.

Search for Imgur URLs on HTML pages.
View HTML source of any pages.
Copy all source into a text file.
Follow the instructions on the Archiveteam Imgur page.

Archiveteam: Run the archiving app

Use the archiving app to help speed up the uploading process.

Kirby

Yu · 2023-05-01 18:15:14

They've already been removing old images. I'm guessing this is going to remove ALL of them?

I use Imgbb for image hosting, it works well

BuzzerBee · 2023-05-02 08:48:16

N1KF wrote:

I went through and submitted the instances of Imgur on the forums

All of them?

N1KF · 2023-05-03 02:32:05

BuzzerBee wrote:

N1KF wrote:
I went through and submitted the instances of Imgur on the forums
All of them?

Probably not. There are instances of URLs being misspelled either by accident or to avoid the spam filter. I manually corrected a few that I found but I probably missed some.

I used this filter to make the list:

\S*imgur\S*

which would miss any URLs with whitespace in them.

In addition I think there may be a mod-only section which I cannot access.

Tomahawk · 2023-05-08 17:24:50

Thanks for the heads up N1KF. We're working on a solution.

MartenM

N1KF · 2023-05-14 22:49:56

WOW I forgot there's only one day left.

The Archiveteam project tracker says:

items 767.23M done + 44.66M out + 206.95M to do

Most, but not perhaps not all images I submitted should be processed and archived. Here is one example.

Tomahawk · 2023-05-31 10:06:53

Uh yeah so Buzz downloaded all Imgur images used on the forums. We're also gonna download the remaining images, with the aim of hosting every image ourselves rather than embedding them from other websites. This means that an image won't be lost when its link dies.

A decent fraction of the ~76k image embeds are already dead (RIP TinyPic, ImageShack, puu.sh, etc.) so we want to preserve what's left. After all, u gotta show ur grandkids the EE Memes thread.

mutantdevle, Atikyne, Kirby, MartenM, Zoey2070, Blackmask, BuzzerBee, N1KF, Gosha, St1ckS4m(EE)

N1KF · 2023-07-19 06:35:20

Tomahawk wrote:

Uh yeah so Buzz downloaded all Imgur images used on the forums. We're also gonna download the remaining images, with the aim of hosting every image ourselves rather than embedding them from other websites. This means that an image won't be lost when its link dies.
A decent fraction of the ~76k image embeds are already dead (RIP TinyPic, ImageShack, puu.sh, etc.) so we want to preserve what's left. After all, u gotta show ur grandkids the EE Memes thread.

That's great to hear. What's the progress on this? Are the images available anywhere?

Also, does that include images that are hyperlinked but not embedded?

Tomahawk · 2023-07-19 09:25:31

N1KF wrote:

What's the progress on this?

Remaining images will be collected soon™. Imgur was the priority.

N1KF wrote:

Are the images available anywhere?

As a big dump, no. I expect they'll eventually be hosted by Diff, and/or bundled into some kinda forum archive in the more distant future.

I have a suspicion that scraping all the Imgur content stopped it from getting marked as "old, unused, and inactive" and being deleted, so we have a bit of time to plan.

N1KF wrote:

Also, does that include images that are hyperlinked but not embedded?

Yes, anything that looks like a URL and links to an image or gif. Links to Imgur albums containing multiple images were also fully scraped, thanks to Buzz.

Official Everybody Edits Forums

#1 2023-04-29 03:39:45