Wiki images broken

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nyov
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Wiki images broken

Post by nyov »

Images on the wiki pages seem perpetually broken, sadly.
This is very sad if you, like me, want to learn about map-creation or tiling or sprite works but all the images referenced in the text are no longer there.

Most often I see offsite image links which link to resources gone with the wind. (/~user/ pages on university webspace etc.)
And most of those I can't even "recover" through archive.org links.

Then there are images hosted on imageshack or photobucket, which broke their own URLs over time, and which are now unreachable if not deleted.
Typical 410 error
Typical 410 error
t03.png.gif (6.42 KiB) Viewed 4922 times

And lastly, some images are actually hosted on the wesnoth.org or www.wesnoth.org domains, but using http protocol links, and are not displayed on a https page because of browser-security. (Because a webserver on Port 80 of the same domain can be something entirely different to the one on Port 443. Just like subdomains can be administered/owned by different entities. I understand some browsers ignore that and can display those images, but I don't care for that security model.)

For that reason, I would like to see some kind of policy to keep these images alive in future, by enforcing them to be hosted on/uploaded to the wesnoth site itself. Fixing http/https links is just a matter of editing some pages, then, possibly even using a linkfixer bot (as I've seen elsewhere).
Last edited by nyov on July 14th, 2019, 10:47 am, edited 1 time in total.
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EarthCake
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Re: Wiki images perpetually broken

Post by EarthCake »

Can you give us exact pages where images are broken? And maybe provide screenshots, because all pages to me have images.
Tad_Carlucci
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Re: Wiki images perpetually broken

Post by Tad_Carlucci »

I did a random check on the Wiki area you linked to, and, yes, some of the images come up as 404-not found. I didn't see any links to photobucket or other such sites.

There is not much we can do about images off-site. The OP for the image chose to place it there and we should respect that. Perhaps they removed their images to prevent further use, it does not always mean the site simply purged them or broke the URL. Some people intentionally use short-term sites (my wife does that, bugs the heck out of me ... I put in a 4T storage device for her images but it's too much hassle for her, and her habit is what it is, so she send my stuff and I know to look because in a day or so it's gone forever).

"editing some pages" to fix the URL to use HTTPS is a huge undertaking. By hand is too error-prone and laborious. It could be automated, but even that has the chance of making changes it should not.
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gnombat
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Re: Wiki images perpetually broken

Post by gnombat »

Are image uploads currently not allowed on the wiki at all?

I tried clicking the "Upload" button but it gave me this error: apierror-permissiondenied
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Ravana
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Re: Wiki images perpetually broken

Post by Ravana »

Accounts are manually whitelisted as uploaders. Contact wiki admins.
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nyov
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Re: Wiki images perpetually broken

Post by nyov »

EarthCake wrote: July 10th, 2019, 12:29 pm Can you give us exact pages where images are broken? And maybe provide screenshots, because all pages to me have images.
Well, as I said, pretty much every page doesn't show images for me. But I checked again with that on mind, and it seems most pages are only issues with the http/s linking. Perhaps with the rest, I just hit the few bad apples where the images were really gone :annoyed:
Nonetheless, links of those pages I recall with 410 errors:
https://wiki.wesnoth.org/Tiles_Tutorial
https://wiki.wesnoth.org/Creating_a_scr ... ilt_sprite
https://wiki.wesnoth.org/Cartography_for_Wesnoth

Tad_Carlucci wrote: July 10th, 2019, 12:34 pm Perhaps they removed their images to prevent further use, it does not always mean the site simply purged them or broke the URL. Some people intentionally use short-term sites [...]
I would think that goes against the point of creating wiki content. Sure, people may change their mind later on about previous contributions. But then please remove the whole wiki-page, not just the images? Such a bad page seems pointless and frustrating to all but the content author.


Okay. Screenshots of my anti-malware browser setup not loading unencrypted stuff on HTTPS sites, just to prove those tinhat-people exist? :doh:
sshot1.png
magic where?
magic where?

If I disable the draconian security :whistle: it seems many page images would load:
sshot3.png
So I overestimated the number of offsite-images probably.


Ravana wrote: July 10th, 2019, 1:58 pm Accounts are manually whitelisted as uploaders. Contact wiki admins.
Well that would prove to be a hurdle for obvious reasons :|
Is such a restriction necessary, when write-access to the wiki itself already requires contacting the admins previously?
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nyov
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Re: Wiki images perpetually broken

Post by nyov »

Tad_Carlucci wrote: July 10th, 2019, 12:34 pm "editing some pages" to fix the URL to use HTTPS is a huge undertaking. By hand is too error-prone and laborious. It could be automated, but even that has the chance of making changes it should not.
I disagree. Yes, editing "some pages" by hand is a huge undertaking (from a maintainers perspective, i.e. if you want to fix them all, right now) but could be done by visitors like me, one at a time when reading it.
Automated wiki bots can handle that easily. If you know a page of http://(wiki.|www.)wesnoth.org is valid, rewriting it to //(wiki.|www.)wesnoth.org (note the protocol-agnostic link) doesn't really have a change of "making changes it should not".

Here I found mediawiki bots that perhaps do that already:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Pywikibot/Scripts
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:P ... checker.py

though I'm not sure how to use them, they seem to need local content and don't work crawling webpages? :hmm:
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Pentarctagon
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Re: Wiki images perpetually broken

Post by Pentarctagon »

Just looking at https://wiki.wesnoth.org/Tiles_Tutorial - one of the images links to http://www.idi.ntnu.no/~haskjold/wesnot ... _tiles.png which is just weird.
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gnombat
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Re: Wiki images perpetually broken

Post by gnombat »

Pentarctagon wrote: July 11th, 2019, 12:10 am Just looking at https://wiki.wesnoth.org/Tiles_Tutorial - one of the images links to http://www.idi.ntnu.no/~haskjold/wesnot ... _tiles.png which is just weird.
http://www.idi.ntnu.no/~haskjold/ was presumably the web site of Hogne Håskjold, Wesnoth's early terrain art director.
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nyov
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Re: Wiki images perpetually broken

Post by nyov »

Too bad they didn't leave a referral-address.

Well, I tried fixing the pages where the images are still around somewhere on the net, but then I noticed I can't upload to the wiki.
But I'm not going to re-up the images on another image-host, only to have them disappear again in another year or so.

Is it really that bad to allow image uploads in the wiki? There is no such limitation in the forum?
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Pentarctagon
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Re: Wiki images perpetually broken

Post by Pentarctagon »

The forums have an attachment limit of 5 per post.
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nyov
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Re: Wiki images perpetually broken

Post by nyov »

Pentarctagon wrote: July 12th, 2019, 1:31 pm The forums have an attachment limit of 5 per post.
Yes. Though I don't really follow, sorry. What do you mean to say with that?
Do you mean we can upload images as forum-attachements and then cross-link them from the wiki, so we wouldn't need image-space on the wiki itself?

In that case, I agree, it's a possibility. If the board (and images) disappear at some point, the wiki is probably quick to follow. But you have the hassle of always needing a forum post (for every 5 pics you have) and where would I put such attachment-only image posts, in off-topic?


In other news, I wrote myself a little crawler script for the wiki, so I can hopefully fix up a ton of simple https->http link referrals in a bit, if not the image-reupload stuff.
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Pentarctagon
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Re: Wiki images perpetually broken

Post by Pentarctagon »

nyov wrote: July 14th, 2019, 10:46 am
Pentarctagon wrote: July 12th, 2019, 1:31 pm The forums have an attachment limit of 5 per post.
Yes. Though I don't really follow, sorry. What do you mean to say with that?
Do you mean we can upload images as forum-attachements and then cross-link them from the wiki, so we wouldn't need image-space on the wiki itself?

In that case, I agree, it's a possibility. If the board (and images) disappear at some point, the wiki is probably quick to follow. But you have the hassle of always needing a forum post (for every 5 pics you have) and where would I put such attachment-only image posts, in off-topic?


In other news, I wrote myself a little crawler script for the wiki, so I can hopefully fix up a ton of simple https->http link referrals in a bit, if not the image-reupload stuff.
You said that there was no limitation on the forum, when there is still a limitation of sorts. Using forum attachments for that purpose would be a worst case scenario though, I think. I'll take a look at the image uploading restriction when I have more time, hopefully in the next couple days, and either maybe you could be given the ability to upload images so you can fix these problems, or you could send the images to me and I'll upload them.
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nyov
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Re: Wiki images perpetually broken

Post by nyov »

Pentarctagon wrote: July 14th, 2019, 7:51 pm You said that there was no limitation on the forum, when there is still a limitation of sorts.
Oh I apologize for my incomprehensible expression. What I meant to say was:
There is no limit against image-uploading in the forum (which also requires registration). It just seems strange (unless it's a disk-space issue or something) that the wiki, which requires an admin to grant accounts, is policing file uploads when in the forums a newly self-registered user can upload images.
Pentarctagon wrote: [...] or you could send the images to me and I'll upload them.
Please don't add to your workload on my account. Then I'll feel like a nuisance. But thanks!
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Pentarctagon
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Re: Wiki images broken

Post by Pentarctagon »

For the wiki, I believe that restriction is related to the spam problem we had, which is what eventually led to people needing to manually request to get an account created. It might be that since all accounts are manually created now, we don't actually need the image upload restriction anymore, but I'd need to double check with a couple other people about that.
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