Imgur: New Workaround

[pizza]

hi all,

as many of you know, imgur has blacklisted this site from hotlinking images. idk exactly why, but from what i've gathered by reading some posts here and their ToS, imgur may have deemed some of the hotlinked activity here as commercial. who knows. point is, GJ's blacklisted.

that isn't news. but there was a hilarious workaround whereby hotlinking via http instead of https broke their anti-hotlinking system. i'm guessing that their internal redirect that does http -> https somehow broke their referer detection system. but hey, looks like they finally fixed it

not the end of the world, but it's kind of a bummer. people have made tons of nice posts with imgur pics hotlinked.

the obvious workaround is to look for suspected missing images you want to view by quoting a post or using your browser's dev tools. once you've extracted the link, you can open it in a new tab and force-refresh (refresh + bypass cache).

(also note that if you've uploaded an image to imgur, you may see it in your post even though others can't. this is because you're looking at a cached image. force-refresh as described above to see what others see.)

but that's annoying!

rejoice, there's a better way: use a browser extension to modify http referers.

for chrome, i can recommend this one, but i'm sure there are others.

with that installed, you just have to configure it to block referer in the header for 3rd party requests to i.imgur.com.

here's how that looks with the extension i linked to above: https://i.imgur.com/KHfvbkX.png

if you did it right, give this page a (force-)refresh, and you should see the screenshot hotlinked above. it's hosted on imgur. and all those old posts with imgur pics (https AND http) will just magically work!

in closing, i should also point out that imgur will almost certainly either die or be gimped eventually. just like every other free image host that's ever been (imageshack, photobucket, tinypic, ...). i think that for important posts you make, it's worth making the extra effort to upload directly to GJ for posterity. help fight image rot! but i realize that this may be less convenient.

overall recommendation? use this setup i describe to view existing GJ posts with imgur images, but don't use imgur to share new images on here going forward because people won't be able to see them without this setup.

hope that helps

 

[NUTTSGT]

Thanks pizza for the updated information.

 

[pizza]

if someone needs help getting it to work in another browser, lmk. i can try to give steps.

 

[bushmechanic]

Doesn't seem people have read through certain stuff.

If they're classifying it as a Content Delivery Network, it would appear to be accurate; and imgur is a voluntary participant in programs that observe much stricter privacy controls.

This website has no privacy policy, is associated with a "family" of sites, does offer classified ads, features data gathering advertising, and there is no indication of who's making what how.

That's a pretty easy fix. Even if classifieds still hold it back, the policy should be in place. A classifieds section alone does not indicate a "Content Delivery Network", which has been their claim.

The presence of a classified section may simply be an impediment to analysis.

 

[Sugarmaker]

Hi,
New to this site but not to loading pictures using imgur to several other forums. I just noticed tonight it did not work the same in one of the forums that had worked before. Maybe just coincidence?
Will be watching.
Regards,
Chris

 

[pizza]

this is the only site i've personally noticed this behavior on, but it makes complete sense that imgur wants to block as much hotlinking as they can reasonably get away with. they don't want to pay for traffic they can't monetize (yet they also don't want to lose too much goodwill too quickly).

i'm sure they periodically look at any site that hotlinks an appreciable amount of their pics and try to find excuses to ban them.