RE: Not seeing some jpg's or gif's
November 21, 2016 at 4:01 pm
(This post was last modified: November 21, 2016 at 4:06 pm by Autumnlicious.)
The question of self-hosting images is a good one. I cannot speak for Tiberius nor am I the final word on this.
Hosting images here invites the following issues - one of legality and one of avoiding undesirable behavior.
Legality:
- we may be liable for infringement by providing a media hosting platform
- we may inadvertently host an image that the linked source removes for personal, legal or business reasons (privacy comes to mind)
Undesirable behavior:
- some people will get the idea to use our bandwidth to serve data for other sites.
- blocking that means we'll have to invest time/effort into keeping a "good enough" system which saps time
- we would have to impose many, many quality of service limits: size, content, encodings, rates of posting, fairness in bandwidth usage, etc, to deal with all edge cases resulting from offering a "free product"
Given Tiberius runs this site as more of a hobby than a business, he would be forced to give up more of his time to properly diligence any legal or technical abuse. Delegating that authority to others would be an imperfect solution given to the unofficial way that moderators are "hired" (responsibility and culpability come to mind) and effectively eat more of his time.
Finally, costs would probably go up with implementation of a simple image hosting feature. Sending HTML is cheap and easy - it compresses well and lends itself to statistical optimizations (various caching approaches). Images, on the other hand, aren't nearly as simple or cheap.
Hosting images here invites the following issues - one of legality and one of avoiding undesirable behavior.
Legality:
- we may be liable for infringement by providing a media hosting platform
- we may inadvertently host an image that the linked source removes for personal, legal or business reasons (privacy comes to mind)
Undesirable behavior:
- some people will get the idea to use our bandwidth to serve data for other sites.
- blocking that means we'll have to invest time/effort into keeping a "good enough" system which saps time
- we would have to impose many, many quality of service limits: size, content, encodings, rates of posting, fairness in bandwidth usage, etc, to deal with all edge cases resulting from offering a "free product"
Given Tiberius runs this site as more of a hobby than a business, he would be forced to give up more of his time to properly diligence any legal or technical abuse. Delegating that authority to others would be an imperfect solution given to the unofficial way that moderators are "hired" (responsibility and culpability come to mind) and effectively eat more of his time.
Finally, costs would probably go up with implementation of a simple image hosting feature. Sending HTML is cheap and easy - it compresses well and lends itself to statistical optimizations (various caching approaches). Images, on the other hand, aren't nearly as simple or cheap.
Slave to the Patriarchy no more
