Scratch

Thanks to everyone above who has spent time thinking carefully about this problem. As many of you have realized, if you take the time to think this through, it's a fairly tough thing to solve.

One of the approaches we've been thinking about is to only allow using the [img] tag for images hosted by a single free and easy to use image hosting provider. So you'd have to upload an image you wanted to use there before linking to it in your post. If the service had its own rules about what is or isn't ok to upload (and ways of enforcing them), we could leverage some of their security to make ours a little stronger, and still allow images in posts.

For example, imageshack's rules prevent inappropriate stuff:
http://imageshack.us/content.php?page=rules

Short version of the ImageShack Terms of Service
Do not upload anything that can be construed as porn, copyrighted material, harassment, or spam. If you do, we will ban you, delete all your images, and prevent you from viewing any images hosted on the ImageShack Network. You own the content that you upload.

If they also have extra code in place to prevent inappropriate stuff, then only allowing images uploaded to their site to show up on our forums might help. (It'd be a comparatively small / easy change to our code.)

But this is just the first site I've checked out - I don't know if they'd be a good hosting site, I'm just using them as an example.  If any of you who are interested in helping solve this problem would like to do some research and suggest image hosts that might be a good fit, we'd be open to checking them out.

Last edited by Lightnin (2012-01-10 16:27:28)

Dinoclor wrote:

They host everything EXCEPT for animated gifs. You need a premium account for animated gifs.

However, other than that they are a very good image host.
And I think we can live without animated gifs.

Yeah, I don't think animated GIFs play a particularly great role in the grand spectrum of the forums. 

In my experience, imageshack has been fairly reliable. 

Daffy22 wrote:

coolstuff wrote:

Dinoclor wrote:

They host everything EXCEPT for animated gifs. You need a premium account for animated gifs.

However, other than that they are a very good image host.
And I think we can live without animated gifs.

Yeah, I don't think animated GIFs play a particularly great role in the grand spectrum of the forums. 

In my experience, imageshack has been fairly reliable. 

Imageshack is great however they want you to make your image link to their site. There is a direct link option but you have to signup for that I think. Would another image host be better? 

Click image with dimensions show in white, big image shows up, right click that, click "copy image location" add and image tag, right click, paste, add an ending image tag.

Imageshack is blocked by many parental controls systems though. 

scimonster wrote:

Imageshack is blocked by many parental controls systems though. 

Like mine. I managed to disable the parental controls though :DDDDDD

BloodFeatherGem123 wrote:

I guess this is permenent right? (I hope not    )

They have said it is temporary. 

scimonster wrote:

Imageshack is blocked by many parental controls systems though. 

That's interesting! Especially considering that their policies prohibit inappropriate stuff. Hmm...

Daffy22 wrote:

Imageshack is great however they want you to make your image link to their site. There is a direct link option but you have to signup for that I think. Would another image host be better? 

Don't know! But please check around, and if you find one that you think would be good (based on the criteria described in my post above), please let us know!

Mokat wrote:

coolstuff wrote:

Dinoclor wrote:

They host everything EXCEPT for animated gifs. You need a premium account for animated gifs.

However, other than that they are a very good image host.
And I think we can live without animated gifs.

Yeah, I don't think animated GIFs play a particularly great role in the grand spectrum of the forums. 

In my experience, imageshack has been fairly reliable. 

Yeah, animated GIFs just make the page take forever to load and really, do we even need them? I mean, they arent' really that important...

I do like to have them in my sig though... 

This is a really interesting idea, but I don't know how many people are going to want to sign up for an extra account and all that. How much work do you think it would be to impliment a flagging system like we have on the main site for the forums? I'm somewhat familiar with computer programing (took Computer Science last year) so I know it can be a lot of work...

Vista4563 wrote:

Or instead of limiting the upload source to one domain, we can just block out the problematic ones?

But then a Scratcher goes out, makes a site using a free web host, puts the inappropriate image there, and bypasses the whole thing.
Problematic?

Servine wrote:

I respect your desicion, but...

@ The forums are now a bit more boring
@ Bye-bye Block Library
@ Everything is less attractive

Couldn't we just upload the post, but until a mod looks at it, the tags are disabled.

good idea! 

The_Magic_Puppeteer wrote:

IMGUR IS MUCH BETTER

how are you a new scratcher with a signature??

scimonster wrote:

schusteralex2 wrote:

The_Magic_Puppeteer wrote:

IMGUR IS MUCH BETTER

how are you a new scratcher with a signature??

He probably had it since before that restriction.

Or got demoted.
Someone 'oughta tell him to stop with the caps all the time, too.