Imgur has blocked the UK

arknor said:
..... gov makes rules, companies dont want to agree with essentially is no different to just banning them.
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This is no different to any other law or legislation, sorry "rule", of a given country - you (business or person) either follow/comply with it or don't.

And in this (specific) case, Medialab didn't want to do this and they themselves have decided to place a geo block on UK users - maybe they thought they could be fined and this would prevent that, or maybe they couldn't be arsed to do the work, who knows.
Either way, Medialab could quite easily remove this block and reinstate access to Imgur again for UK users. Medialab are fully in control of this block, not the ICO, Ofcom, UK government or any other UK agency.

And given Medialab doesn't appear to have a physical presence within the UK, i believe IMO they could have done nothing and left the ball in the ICO/UK's court to determine the outcome. But again, Medialab didn't do this.

arknor said:
they are not applying this crap equally, someone is lobbying for it against specific targets exactly like they did with piracy.
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Again, what does piracy have to do with this specific case?
Piracy websites aren't typically blocked on GDPR or OSA grounds but rather copyright, which is an entirely different kettle of fish.

And i appreciate this is GD and it's far more lenient here towards forcing users to offer up anything of any real substance to back up their wild claims but to stop this becoming a conspiracy theorists wet dream, have you got any source or form of evidence, honestly i would quite happily take a crayon diagram at this point, to back up your claim that "they are not applying this crap equally" and that "someone is lobbying for it against specific targets"?

For starters, who are "they" and "someone"?
Do you think it's these guys? You do don't you?
WMBOky16_o.jpg
 
Years of forum posts with images and videos down the drain now for me and some were help videos and technical images... What a bad joke everything is becoming now.

Honestly don't blame Imgur.com for their reaction and I'm sure many more companies will follow them in that route thanks to these laws. All they are going to do is make everyone move onto VPNs and other forms of bypassing these restrictions and opening up even more dangerous sites that were filtered out before threw normal internet access... Well done law makers ...making the internet more and more dangerous to use with silly Laws that didn't need to be there for some sites, but agree on some sites having restrictions and should have from day one of the internet really.
 
Purgatory said:
Years of forum posts with images and videos down the drain now for me and some were help videos and technical images... What a bad joke everything is becoming now.
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Existing posts with Imgur media on here have been converted to native attachments fortunately, thanks to the OcUK forum overlords. No idea how other forums have dealt with it though.
 
I've always viewed these forums as a clean, minimalist, not many images kind of place which is one of its appeals compared to the other forums of their day filled with gifs, oversized signatures and the like. It is another annoying restriction making the internet even more frustrating to use. I'd place it way far down below GDPR cookie notices though. I'm all for protection measures put in place but I don't see it doing much since you can easily get around these things.
 
moogle said:
I've always viewed these forums as a clean, minimalist, not many images kind of place which is one of its appeals compared to the other forums of their day filled with gifs, oversized signatures and the like. It is another annoying restriction making the internet even more frustrating to use. I'd place it way far down below GDPR cookie notices though. I'm all for protection measures put in place but I don't see it doing much since you can easily get around these things.
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All these laws do is affect the ignorant. Real criminals got around them within minutes.
 
Lots of broken signatures showing for people in this thread. I'm offering to host them, see here:

Is your signature hosted on imgur? I'll host it for you.

If your signature is hosted on imgur and is showing a purple placeholder, I'm happy to host it for you. I'm fed up with seeing so many purple boxes where signatures should be like this: If you'd like me to host it, just reply in this thread, I'll pick it up via a VPN and save it to my own...
forums.overclockers.co.uk forums.overclockers.co.uk
 
Pho said:
Not sure if anyone's mentioned it but DuckDuckGo have a proxy you can use to quickly bypass the block without using a VPN. Just stick the imgur link at the end and bingo


I also hacked a Tampermonkey script together (ChatGPT did because I was being lazy) which seems to work
  1. Install Tampermonkey extension for your brower
  2. Go to create new script
  3. Paste in this script and save
    Code: 
    // ==UserScript==
// @name         Imgur to DuckDuckGo
// @description  Replaces Imgur with DuckDuckGo image proxy links
// @match        *://*/*
// @match        *:///*/*
// @run-at       document-end
// @version      1.0.0
// ==/UserScript==

(function() {
    'use strict';

    const duckify = url => 'https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=' + encodeURIComponent(url);

    function replaceImgurLinks() {
        // Replace <img> sources
        document.querySelectorAll('img[src*="imgur.com"]').forEach(img => {
            img.src = duckify(img.src);
        });

        // Replace <a> hrefs
        document.querySelectorAll('a[href*="imgur.com"]').forEach(a => {
            a.href = duckify(a.href);
        });
    }

    // Run once initially
    replaceImgurLinks();

    // Re-run whenever new content appears
    const observer = new MutationObserver(replaceImgurLinks);
    observer.observe(document.body, { childList: true, subtree: true });
})();
  4. You should be good to go

It works for various signatures etc on here anyway.
Click to expand...

Thanks for this! Found this script while googling for a solution and it works pretty well. The only issue I had with it was that it was not working with Imagus extension, however after debugging I realised it was because Imagus injects its <img> element to the top level of the DOM, rather than on the body node, so the observer was not firing properly. Resolved it by simply changing the observer target to the root DOM node `document.documentElement`, eg.

Code: 
// ==UserScript==
// @name         Imgur to DuckDuckGo
// @description  Replaces Imgur with DuckDuckGo image proxy links
// @match        *://*/*
// @match        *:///*/*
// @run-at       document-end
// @version      1.0.1
// ==/UserScript==

(function() {
    'use strict';

    const duckify = url => 'https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=' + encodeURIComponent(url);

    function replaceImgurLinks() {
        // Replace <img> sources
        document.querySelectorAll('img[src*="imgur.com"]').forEach(img => {
            img.src = duckify(img.src);
        });

        // Replace <a> hrefs
        document.querySelectorAll('a[href*="imgur.com"]').forEach(a => {
            a.href = duckify(a.href);
        });
    }

    // Run once initially
    replaceImgurLinks();

    // Re-run whenever new content appears
    const observer = new MutationObserver(replaceImgurLinks);
    observer.observe(document.documentElement, { childList: true, subtree: true });
})();
 
aithys said:
Thanks for this! Found this script while googling for a solution and it works pretty well. The only issue I had with it was that it was not working with Imagus extension, however after debugging I realised it was because Imagus injects its <img> element to the top level of the DOM, rather than on the body node, so the observer was not firing properly. Resolved it by simply changing the observer target to the root DOM node `document.documentElement`, eg.

Code: 
// ==UserScript==
// @name         Imgur to DuckDuckGo
// @description  Replaces Imgur with DuckDuckGo image proxy links
// @match        *://*/*
// @match        *:///*/*
// @run-at       document-end
// @version      1.0.1
// ==/UserScript==

(function() {
    'use strict';

    const duckify = url => 'https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=' + encodeURIComponent(url);

    function replaceImgurLinks() {
        // Replace <img> sources
        document.querySelectorAll('img[src*="imgur.com"]').forEach(img => {
            img.src = duckify(img.src);
        });

        // Replace <a> hrefs
        document.querySelectorAll('a[href*="imgur.com"]').forEach(a => {
            a.href = duckify(a.href);
        });
    }

    // Run once initially
    replaceImgurLinks();

    // Re-run whenever new content appears
    const observer = new MutationObserver(replaceImgurLinks);
    observer.observe(document.documentElement, { childList: true, subtree: true });
})();
Click to expand...

Oh nice, I've never used that extension before but good job getting it working.



unwashed potato! said:
the issue is surely that this is only good to browse imgur. in every other way it's mostly useless given no one else in the uk can see anything you upload/link to.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I mostly just need to be able to view existing Imgur images when I'm looking at websites/guides/articles etc that have hosted images via Imgur.
 
My understanding is that Imgur has blocked the UK over a proposed ICO fine under (I believe) the UK GDPR as opposed to under the Online Safety Act which is the piece of legislation that a lot of people are incorrectly attributing their geoblock to. Legally speaking their geoblock does nothing to protect them from privacy-related legal action because they can still be fined for failures prior to the 30th September or so when they blocked UK access, and as a result I feel is quite a questionable action for them to have taken when most medium sized tech businesses like them will have instead taken steps to comply with UK or EU legislation.

In my case I've never used Imgur to host images in the first place (I have my own site with an Italian host called Altervista and use it to hotlink my own images), but do feel it's a bit of a let down that I can now only view Imgur-hosted images by connecting to a VPN based outside of the UK. I think since the platform started blocking the UK there has been a shift away from users elsewhere in the world from using Imgur to host their images, certainly in cases where they are aware that the site is blocking itself to UK users.
 
Last edited:
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