New images from imgur not proxied?

[evildice]

Old images (linked before server move) hosted on imgur seem to work fine.

New images (post-move) seem to be broken in normal posts, but work in replies.

Is imgur rejecting the image proxy request or something?

Spoiler: Example

 

[alethiophile]

Do you see any new images working that aren't from imgur?

 

[evildice]

Do you see any new images working that aren't from imgur?

Click to shrink...

Yeah, for example in the funny images thread, here's my first post after the move:

https://forum.questionablequesting.com/posts/7415256/

A bunch of other images posted after that do appear to be proxied correctly.

Other people linking from imgur seem to also not get proxied (images work in reply, not in regular post).

Perhaps imgur is blocking the new host? If so then I'll find another re-hosting site. But imgur is very convenient for anonymous hosting so it would be nice if it could work.

 

[evildice]

Here's someone else trying to use imgur as a picture host:

https://forum.questionablequesting.com/posts/7415778/

Same issue as my posts.

 

[da3monh0st3d]

Yeah, for example in the funny images thread, here's my first post after the move:

https://forum.questionablequesting.com/posts/7415256/

A bunch of other images posted after that do appear to be proxied correctly.

Other people linking from imgur seem to also not get proxied (images work in reply, not in regular post).

Perhaps imgur is blocking the new host? If so then I'll find another re-hosting site. But imgur is very convenient for anonymous hosting so it would be nice if it could work.

Click to shrink...

Considering the shenanigans imgur has been pulling recently, I don't think it's likely to get any better.

It's slowly approaching the final phase of its existence as a platform and preventing non-monetizable use (with as little effort as possible) is part of that.

Mostly likely you'll also have to pull shenanigans in the proxy to counter their own.

 

[alethiophile]

I see in the image proxy that no imgur images since the move have gone in successfully. Unfortunately, I can't immediately see why. It's plausible imgur is blocking the scan.

For the moment, I would recommend using a different host.

 

[heralding_bubble]

river flows, grass grows, imgur gets worse
the natural order of the world

 

[macdjord]

alethiophile: Someone suggested the problem is the way that Imgur redirects direct links to images into links to the pages hosting those images - e.g. if you click on https://i.imgur.com/fSbAvaz.png, you will be automatically redirected to https://imgur.com/fSbAvaz.

Now, I can see how that redirect would mess up loading the embedded image. The question, then, becomes why do the images work when loaded in the editor. My guess would be that Imgur don't want to block hotlinking, so they look at some aspect of the incoming query to determine whether the request is an embedded image or a followed link, and only redirect it if its a link. In which case the problem is that the query issued by the image proxy looks more like a followed link than an embedded image.

 

[alethiophile]

alethiophile: Someone suggested the problem is the way that Imgur redirects direct links to images into links to the pages hosting those images - e.g. if you click on https://i.imgur.com/fSbAvaz.png, you will be automatically redirected to https://imgur.com/fSbAvaz.

Now, I can see how that redirect would mess up loading the embedded image. The question, then, becomes why do the images work when loaded in the editor. My guess would be that Imgur don't want to block hotlinking, so they look at some aspect of the incoming query to determine whether the request is an embedded image or a followed link, and only redirect it if its a link. In which case the problem is that the query issued by the image proxy looks more like a followed link than an embedded image.

Click to shrink...

Yeah, this is clearly the basic issue. The problem is that this started happening after the server move, and the requests should be identical before and after on the software level, since the software was just copied over. This suggests that imgur is also examining the traffic source to dispatch requests, and they won't fulfill requests from the new server specifically. (This sort of thing is a relatively common tactic for sites that want to defeat web scrapers.) Unfortunately there's not much I can actually do about this, without going to a lot of trouble to set up a proxy or something.

I'm hoping to change the setup of how we handle images after the XF2 upgrade, so as to obviate the issue.