Imgur has blocked the UK

Just testing imagebox:

3iXbeUry_o.jpg

 
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To me it presents an ideal opportunity to set up your own image host using something like Slink. It happened to Photobucket, it's happened to Imgur, and no doubt it'll happen to other image hosting sites. 'It' being users are no longer able to share pictures for whatever reason and having to trawl through potentially hundreds of posts to update things otherwise the audience sees a dead link. If all you post is memes then absolutely no need, but if you're a photographer, forum blogger etc, it's worth setting something up.

There's a few easy steps:
  • Buy own domain (these are cheap)
  • Create free Cloudflare account
  • Register domain DNS with Cloudflare, or register the domain through Cloudflare
  • Either locally using a NAS, or RPi install docker/portainer or whatever other option you want
  • Or create a free Oracle Cloud account and deploy a free Ampere instance
  • Either use Cloudflare tunnels or Cloudflare proxies for access
  • User something like Traefik for automated SSL
  • Deploy slink
You also get the opportunity to run other containers, such as Adguard Home/PiHole, Cloudflared, and generally everything you want. Your own host, and you get something to experiment with as well as some learning along the way.
 
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Back in the day with ntlworld internet (before Virgin), you used to get about 50MB of hosting which you could ftp to and stash images or even make a website. It used to feature your username as part of the url I think. :)
 
jaybee said:
Back in the day with ntlworld internet (before Virgin), you used to get about 50MB of hosting which you could ftp to and stash images or even make a website. It used to feature your username as part of the url I think. :)
Click to expand...

Angelfire was the real deal :cool:

making-websites-on-geocities-or-angelfire-v0-5koek4l0bqla1.jpg
 
Nasher said:
It was, much less noise and the people on it were mostly techs who knew what they were doing/talking about.
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There was also so much free "raunchy" stuff in unexpected places...

I think the signal to noise ratio in terms of human interaction was better, but at the same time it was a lot less safe technically (flash, java etc), and the amount of porn and viagra spam was through the roof.
 
Werewolf said:
There was also so much free "raunchy" stuff in unexpected places...

I think the signal to noise ratio in terms of human interaction was better, but at the same time it was a lot less safe technically (flash, java etc), and the amount of porn and viagra spam was through the roof.
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Still is according to the government (and java is STILL unsafe):D

But as we know, they are still in the 20th century...

Porn is the reason the internet grew in the first place. Porn and maybe gaming and pirate music/movies (same audience lol). No one is going to stop that. Business didn't really jump on it until the late 90s.
 
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The thing is, the porn spam wasn't targetted specifically, and 90's though early 00's it was rare for a kid to have a computer, let alone internet access in their room and most of what I recall seeing*, was relatively tame compared to a lot of what is pushed today, and pushed even at accounts that are theoretically flagged as being used by minors.

You also have things like youtube showing adverts for "self defence" items such as "modified glock for shooting rubber bullets" and "anti dog attack extending stick" (basically a knock off ASP type baton), both of which friends have seen recently.


*The forums back in the day were a nightmare to moderate if no mods had been on for a few hours over night, we could wake up to hundreds of posts and threads of porn and viagra stuff and spend an hour cleaning it up, despite the blocked email domain list having hundreds/thousands of entries.
 
Werewolf said:
The thing is, the porn spam wasn't targetted specifically, and 90's though early 00's it was rare for a kid to have a computer, let alone internet access in their room and most of what I recall seeing*, was relatively tame compared to a lot of what is pushed today, and pushed even at accounts that are theoretically flagged as being used by minors.

You also have things like youtube showing adverts for "self defence" items such as "modified glock for shooting rubber bullets" and "anti dog attack extending stick" (basically a knock off ASP type baton), both of which friends have seen recently.


*The forums back in the day were a nightmare to moderate if no mods had been on for a few hours over night, we could wake up to hundreds of posts and threads of porn and viagra stuff and spend an hour cleaning it up, despite the blocked email domain list having hundreds/thousands of entries.
Click to expand...

The world has got a lot more violent since the 90s.

Even the sort of detailed and graphic violence/gore you see in movies now probably wouldn't pass back then.
 
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ChrisD. said:
To me it presents an ideal opportunity to set up your own image host using something like Slink. It happened to Photobucket, it's happened to Imgur, and no doubt it'll happen to other image hosting sites. 'It' being users are no longer able to share pictures for whatever reason and having to trawl through potentially hundreds of posts to update things otherwise the audience sees a dead link. If all you post is memes then absolutely no need, but if you're a photographer, forum blogger etc, it's worth setting something up.

There's a few easy steps:
  • Buy own domain (these are cheap)
  • Create free Cloudflare account
  • Register domain DNS with Cloudflare, or register the domain through Cloudflare
  • Either locally using a NAS, or RPi install docker/portainer or whatever other option you want
  • Or create a free Oracle Cloud account and deploy a free Ampere instance
  • Either use Cloudflare tunnels or Cloudflare proxies for access
  • User something like Traefik for automated SSL
  • Deploy slink
You also get the opportunity to run other containers, such as Adguard Home/PiHole, Cloudflared, and generally everything you want. Your own host, and you get something to experiment with as well as some learning along the way.
Click to expand...

Now explain how to do all this to the average non tech forum user who needed a detailed walkthrough on how to use Imgur after Photobucket went.

Great for the more tech DIY inclined on a forum like this one, a non starter basically everywhere else. Copy pasting BBcode from one website to another is about the technical limit of a lot of users.
 
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Feek said:
Why not? It's probably easier than ever now.

Pi Zero, Apache, Dynamic DNS, done.
Click to expand...

Those words mean nothing to most people.

I'm quite technical, but I've never had cause to do this before, so I'd still have to look it up before I know what I'm doing!

I have a domain and a server so I guess I'm half way there already though. :p
 
Tbh I've never really thought about it and rarely post images on here anyway (have mostly used imgbb, didn't realise about the bandwidth restrictions...)
I'm already paying for a static IP and have a NAS that I could run a container from, so probably not a big deal to set something up. (just domain/dns/vpn... and could probably use a free vpn)

But I'm fairly IT savvy (or at least try to convince my employers of that :P ), could defintely be more trouble than it's worth for less experienced people and no doubt has had a major impact on many forums (I think we're lucky here in that it's UK centric so there's motivation for the owners/mods to try to help out)
 
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