Images on the forum - Voxelmanip Forums

ROllerozxa	ROllerozxa	Posted on 2025-10-04 01:12 (edited 2025-10-04 01:13) Link
Posts: 249 Joined: 2022-06-04	So I think by now we should have the talk, about the future of how to post images onto the forum. Previously I've just recommended people to use Postimages if they want to post images onto the forum. Upload your image there, copy the link and then put it inside [img] tags. Some have also used other services like Imgur or catbox.moe. But they all have one fatal flaw: They are third-party services operating in the mostly unsustainable world of free image hosting sites, we have no control over what happens with them and they can delete stuff, enshittify or just disappear overnight, at any point in time. And even if the image service is operating well, the Internet itself has slowly started to deteriorate over the years and you might not be able to see the images anyway. Of recent note is the UK's Online Safety Act causing Imgur to block UK visitors making any Imgur hosted images hotlinked onto forums break (...allegedly. I don't have an UK IP, so can't check). I have also heard that catbox.moe has or had been blocked by UK ISPs due some kind of overzealous DNS filter they source from the IWF. For the forum to thrive and the content to last for a long time without link rot for images becoming an issue, we need to become independent of these whims. In addition to that, now that the Voxelmanip Forums is becoming a bit of a gated community with the invitation system, I have warmed up towards the idea of allowing people to upload images directly here on the forums. So I picked up the old Acmlmboard-like file uploader I wrote for the old Voxelmanip Forums codebase, rewrote it for Cirrusboard and have now integrated it into the fork that Voxelmanip Forums runs. The uploader page is available here, but regular users can't upload stuff to it yet. I have still some things I want to tweak with it, most importantly you should probably only see the files you yourself have uploaded if you're a regular user. But I have already used it to move some existing post images I've been hosting on the forum, and will likely try to write something to scrape the rest and upload it there.

ROllerozxa	ROllerozxa	Posted on 2025-10-04 21:02 (edited 2025-10-04 21:04) Link
Posts: 249 Joined: 2022-06-04	So I got a big heap of images from old posts uploaded to the uploader now, including some that had already become broken but which I managed to recover (such as Discord attachment links). There hasn't been too many images posted onto the forum so making an automatic scraper-and-uploader turned out to not really be necessary. The uploader is now also accessible for everyone with an account to upload to now. The filesize limit is 1MB currently. I may raise that later but please try to shrink your image filesizes if your phone takes 7 MB 8K photos or something.

ROllerozxa	ROllerozxa	Posted on 2025-10-05 16:50 Link
Posts: 249 Joined: 2022-06-04	I have added a new BBCode tag called `imgs`, based on the old ABXD tag with the same name. It means "image small", "image scaled", whatever, but basically it's an image thumbnail. It will scale down the image to fit within a 300x300 area and you can then click on the image to expand it: Since I would like to encourage people to use this tag, especially for larger images, I have changed the image button in the post toolbar to use this one now. Just remove the "s" from the tag if you really do want the image to be displayed at the original size (like a screenshot that is small but still larger than 300x300).

olive	olive	Posted on 2025-10-18 13:20 Link
Posts: 56 Joined: 2022-06-29	I can confirm the very annoying Imgur block. catbox.moe works fine with my ISP though occasionally breaks for a few days, wasn't aware some people might have issues or this was related to the new law. On-site uploads is great!!