Feature Request - push proxy cached images into embeds

[Carl Maltby]

The following is an open letter to IPS development management on an issue that affects very old sites, a vital feature whose inclusion would benefit all sites going forward, and the ability for younger client sites to grow with reliance on content integrity vs. internet link rot. I am fully aware that I am far from being the best ambassador to campaign for this powerful and vital feature inclusion, especially from a technical standpoint. I am hoping that the client community will back me up with a can-do attitude where my personal abilities fall short. I am after all better at what I write about than I am the technical aspects of site management and deeper coding.

Thanks in advance.

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IPS,

Our site has been a client with Invision for almost 15yrs, and as you can understand we have accrued many many years of content. The nature of our site is a non-profit educational resource, one that visitors and members can rely on to serve years of knowledge accrued by the generous nature of our site's members both past and present. We need to protect that resource, however the tools to do so are not reliable/do not exist and previous attempts to have it figure on the IPS development arc have gained zero traction.

Our ability to reliably maintain any weight of content is reliant on a number of things, but has always had a major hole that IPS' development only covers indirectly; that of remote images. As soon as the suite was updated with a remote image proxy cache, we immediately pushed that up to "indefinite" in order that we can best prevent remote images linked within content from going dead. It works, but is a fragile and unreliable feature that is easily lost, with many years of seldom-visited content still not cached that may go dead in the meantime.

We specifically upgraded our hosting tier to purchase additional account disk space month-on-month. We are paying to preserve content, as this is crucial to maintaining well over a decade of valuable content going forward. With the recent changes in Photobucket's remote image linking policy, remote image link rot has accelerated enormously becoming the hot issue for many site owners. We do not expect that this will improve, if anything the opposite. We need a defensible mechanism to preserve site content in line with the otherwise professional-level that we have come to expect of the IPS suite.

My proposal suits both the objectives of clients and IPS; the growth of sites is helped considerably by our ability to maintain older content with integrity. Whilst some cloud clients such as ourselves may pay for a higher tier than required just to accommodate a proxy cache, growing sites will do so as their membership increases as any reliably-curated site with quality content tends to do. To put it another way; we are in the content business, so we need the tools to protect that content. By giving us the ability to do that, we become better-paying customers. That IPS have not specifically added this already is somewhat obscure and difficult to understand. We are all losing our older content and the tools to reinforce it are not being added. Older sites are uncontrollably decaying, and equally, younger sites cannot fully mature as link rot snaps at their heels. This must change.

The following identified mechanisms would be infinitely-valuable for clients at levels:

• The ability to convert remote linked images into discrete embeds
  • Post-level, thread-level or forum-level methods of pulling a proxy-cached image into posts as specifically-attached media.
• Proxy cache versioning
  • Proxied images with several versions that can be selectively pushed using the previous mechanism. This prevents "poisoned" cached images such as a remote site's default placeholder image from taking precedence over the intended image.

Whilst several other ideas exist, these basic tools would represent a huge step forward for content-curators and sites that need to preserve valuable content going forward.

IPS - I hope that you can engage in meaningful discussion here in order to make this happen. Currently there appears to be zero interest in making an essentially vital tool even possible for clients.

[mick2me]

Our site has been with Invision since 2004. From the days of IPB 1.x and free! 

We host local history discussions for The City of Nottingham UK. 

Many members have hosted their images with PB over the year, sadly some of those members are no longer with us.

IPB are we any closer to a solution?