Users with broken avatars

[Roobar]

Is it me, or is an image hosting service down? Or a forum bug? I see a lot of people with broken avatars.

Here's what I see:



Here are a few users with broken avatars: Quillax, K1n9_Duk3, Malvineous, DarkAle, Grandy02, Syllypryde

[DarkAle]

I got this avatar bug, too . But when I use my mobile phone to access the PCKF I see them

[Benvolio]

I noted this problem before and Grandy02 explained to me that it's apparently due to whether https is used on the hosting site. Some browsers such as Chrome by default will hide embedded images from non https sites (which include shikadi.net). Other browsers like Firefox and Edge seem more happy to display them. So this is probably what's going on.

Edit. I posted the above then read this posting from Malvineous:

Hi all,

Just a heads up after a two year hiatus I have finally finished moving the KeenWiki over to a new server. If you notice any problems please let me know. All the old links should continue to work and will just quietly forward you on to the new server, but from now on you should use links starting with https://keenwiki.shikadi.net/ rather than the old http://www.shikadi.net/keenwiki/

The change in domain may mean your browser forgets your password so hopefully everyone remembers theirs. I get the occasional bounce from someone who has forgotten their password and tried to reset it, but they aren't using that e-mail address any longer either, so probably a good opportunity to make sure the e-mail address in your KeenWiki user profile is current.

For anyone interested in the technical detail the server has been moved from Linode over to Amazon AWS, as it seems to perform a bit better there and is a bit easier to maintain. It's now hosted in a Docker container running on Amazon ECS so I'm hoping that will make it easier to do future MediaWiki upgrades.

[Malvineous]

The server move shouldn't have broken any avatars - all the old URLs are either still available or forwarding to their replacements, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

It is true that the lack of HTTPS would be causing problems as everything is moving in that direction. The new KeenWiki and ModdingWiki are now on HTTPS so updating any links would help there. For example, DarkAle's avatar is currently set to this:

Code: Select all

http://www.shikadi.net/wiki/keen/images/1/10/The_Ultra_Omegamatic_-_Koarthbot.png

However if you now try to open that URL (and possibly refresh it) you should get pushed over to the new one, which is:

Code: Select all

https://keenwiki.shikadi.net/i/1/10/The_Ultra_Omegamatic_-_Koarthbot.png

This redirect alone won't fix the avatar (because you get there via a non-HTTPS link) however if you go into your forum profile settings and change your avatar to use the new HTTPS URL that should make your avatar visible for everyone again.

If anyone with database access to the forum feels like it, you can do a bulk update on avatar URLs by changing the prefix as above to bump them all across to HTTPS, so even inactive users who are using wiki images for their avatars will get updated.

I will see what I can do about the other shikadi.net sites, but most of the non-wiki stuff is hosted on S3 which doesn't support SSL. It looks like you can set up CloudFront to provide SSL but there's a per-gigabyte cost on that so I will have to work out whether it's worth it.

[DarkAle]

I now changed the link of my avatar. Thanks Malvineous

[Malvineous]

No worries. It looks like CloudFront isn't as bad as I expected so I've set it up for https://k1n9duk3.shikadi.net as a trial. Does this work properly for everyone? If K1n9_Duk3 is around, the HTTPS URL for your avatar should now work (just view the old URL and reload it, and it will push you to HTTPS and you can use that URL instead). Looks like it also makes it available over IPv6 as well which is nice too.

[K1n9_Duk3]

If K1n9_Duk3 is around

Yeah, I'm here. I just changed my avatar's URL to https and it seems to work fine, at least on my end. Does the change to https mean that the images won't work on old browsers that don't support the https protocol? I'm not sure whether it would even be possible to browse this forum with such an old browser, but it would be interesting to know.

On a somewhat related note, I think it would have been better if the avatars were actually hosted on the forum instead of everyone being forced to use off-site images. I have seen phpBB based forums that force the user to use on-site avatar images, either by uploading your custom image or by selecting from a gallery, so it's just a matter of how the forum is configured. I think this would also solve any http vs. https conflicts, since everything would be on the same server and the image url could be relative instead of absolute and therefore automatically pick either http or https, depending on how you connect to the server.

[Malvineous]

I had set it to force HTTP to HTTPS for k1n9duk3.shikadi.net but I've just switched that off, so now you should be able to access it via either protocol.

It would probably be better to host the avatars on the forum in many ways, because at the moment any time someone visits a topic I can see their IP address and what topic they are viewing in my server logs as their browser requests all the avatar images. Granted here it's not a major privacy issue but I suppose it's the principle.

[Syllypryde]

My avatar is Atroxus. I got the picture from Keenwiki on the Atroxian Realm page. I had noticed several months ago it was broken. I even tried to update it again through my control panel but it still seemed to be broken. But this was on my laptop. When I went to this page on my iPad mini the avatar was there. Towards the end of 2020 it seemed like the avatar was no longer broken and I could see it again. It seems in the last week it is broken again. I will go to the new URL for the Keenwiki and see if updating my avatar will bring it back.

[Nisaba]

DarkAle's, K1n9_Duk3's and Syllypryde's avatars do load just fine on my end.

[...] I think it would have been better if the avatars were actually hosted on the forum [...]

I second this. technically this shouldn't be a problem. last year or so I already talked to Fleex about moving user avatars to pckf's server space at keenmodding.org. let's se what he has to say about this idea:

[Quillax]

I just fixed my avatar!

By the way, I do like the idea of hosting the avatars on this forum!