Viewing photos requires being logged in - prevents archiving

[Michael's Workshop]

Thanks for the effort in getting this launched and underway!

I noticed that before being logged in, clicking on photo thumbnails inside posted messages won't display full photos -- the system wants to force you to sign up and be logged in to do so.

This may encourage signups, and also restrain photo bandwidth usage spent for larger images for bots and unsubscribed visitors (human or otherwise), but it limits archiving by archive.org or whomever for referencing back to the site in future during outages, high traffic events, or after the site is gone from the web. I have encountered this on a few other forums myself over the years, and several times wished there was a way to have gotten access to the images down the road.

Just throwing this suggestion out there... it may be a simple setting that could be disabled, and would make a difference to permanently preserving EVERYTHING great here as a resource long term.

best wishes,
Michael

 

[fehervaria]

There will be board meeting soon, @Branchus, @eric, @Stephen - the archiving reason could be a good point to let semi-downsized image available for non-registred/not-loggedin visitors. Bigger than the thumbnail previews but smaller than the original/fullsize image.
Thank you in advance.

 

[Branchus]

There will be board meeting soon, @Branchus, @eric, @Stephen - the archiving reason could be a good point to let semi-downsized image available for non-registred/not-loggedin visitors. Bigger than the thumbnail previews but smaller than the original/fullsize image.
Thank you in advance.

Don't worry, this is already on the agenda.

 

[reallyrandy]

Couldn't you create a service account that logs in for backups? We do that for some cloud accounts (Box, OneDrive ,etc.) at work that we need to back up locally per industry regulation.

 

[eric]

We discussed this and are going to open it up. We agree archival and user experience will be better. No one wants to find a page on the way back machine with missing or tiny photos. We also will be publishing full offline backups with full assets so even if a scraper or archive misses it, it should be avalible. We will be watching badnwith and making sure cloudflare is configured to cache as much as possible. We'll announce it once it's complete in the next week or so.