Third-party images suddenly not showing

[Artefaqs Corporation]

My users are having trouble where suddenly images from third-party URLs like Imagur are no longer working.  There's just the broken image box.

For some reason, pictures from Flickr are OK.  But nothing else.   For example: http://imgur.com/gallery/Evxvt

Any thoughts?

 

[Nathan Explosion]

imgur don't link hotlinking - simple as that.

http://imgur.com/tos

[Flitterkill]

Nonsense. Hotlinking is fine, it is an image hosting service after all. If you are using them for content hosting, setting your forum images to all be stored there in the ACP for example, that IS against the TOS and if caught you'd get shut down.

Is it just the Imgur service or are there others (except Flickr) that are broken?

[Colonel_mortis]

Imgur supports hotlinking fine, provided that you're not using it to serve site resources or adult content. However, the link provided is not the URL that you have to paste into the editor to make it embed - the actual url is http://i.imgur.com/V9CCzPG.png, which autoembeds correctly for me. To get that, I just right clicked on the image and clicked "copy image location". For images that are not in the gallery, you can just copy the direct link in the sidebar, and paste that into the editor.

[Artefaqs Corporation]

Nope, http://i.imgur.com/V9CCzPG.png doesn't embed, either.  Just the broken image icon.

It's not a problem with people not knowing how to do it.  They've been doing it for years (the forum has been online for 15 years).  It's just that suddenly IPS won't embed any images other than Flickr.

 

I did some HTTP sniffing, and it looks like imgur is sending back a 403.  I wonder if one of my users got my form banned from imgur for some reason.

[Rhett]

From their TOS

 

Also, don't use Imgur to host image libraries you link to from elsewhere, content for your website, advertising, avatars, or anything else that turns us into your content delivery network. If you do – and we will be the judge – or if you do anything illegal, in addition to any other legal rights we may have, we will ban you along with the site you're hotlinking from, delete all your images

 

In testing that image, it embeds fine with IPS, that would indicate they have blocked your domain perhaps for the one of the above TOS items.

[Colonel_mortis]

5 hours ago, Artefaqs Corporation said:

Nope, http://i.imgur.com/V9CCzPG.png doesn't embed, either.  Just the broken image icon.

It's not a problem with people not knowing how to do it.  They've been doing it for years (the forum has been online for 15 years).  It's just that suddenly IPS won't embed any images other than Flickr.

 

I did some HTTP sniffing, and it looks like imgur is sending back a 403.  I wonder if one of my users got my form banned from imgur for some reason.

Yeah it looks like you have been blacklisted - the image returns 200 OK most of the time, but if I add your site as a referrer, it switches to 403 forbidden.