Slowness
I apologize for the slowness at the current moment, but right now the “afternoon peak” traffic is occuring (bandwidth usage is usually at it’s highest point in the late afternoon / early evening European time) and the site is “suffering” from another Digg submission with over 5000 (!) diggs. The net result is that the server is a little overloaded and the network connection (100mbit) is being maxed out.
To combat this problem, I’ve put the new server I talked about in an earlier post (identifiable by the upload url e.imagehost.org) in to active duty immediately. The only problem is that the method my scripts use to transfer new uploads to this server (which unfortunately are still coming from the overloaded server) isn’t terribly reliable, so some uploads may fail. If that happens, just try again.
I apologize for the inconvinience. I have ideas on how these various issues can be addressed and handled better in the future, but unfortunately this will require further script development so it will probably not be ready soon enough to be of any help right now.
Update: above text applied to Friday, November 14. Site performance should now be back to normal.
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November 15th, 2008 at 19:11
Yes, I like image host a lot, but I just want to ask, why do you store .swf files in a Zip Archive now? I want to put them up on a board, but now that theres no embed code I can’t. I just want to know why.
November 17th, 2008 at 10:55
I apologize for not informing about the changed policy for SWF files. Basically some time ago ImageHost.org was abused by someone uploading thousands of tiny flash files which contained a URL redirect. He then proceeded to link to the uploaded flash files from spam emails. The reason for this method was probably that security software (anti-virus, anti-phishing, etc) would probably quickly block his spam emails if he included the same spamvertised URL in the emails, but by using randomized URL through ImageHost.org he was able to circumvent that measure.
Needless to say that caused quite a bit of work for me to reply to all the spam abuse reports and to quickly delete the flash files that had been uploaded. To prevent this “attack angle” from being abused I changed some code so that SWF files were treated the same way as PHP & HTML files, namely by packing them in ZIP files. Even if the potential spam abuse wasn’t an issue, there is still the problem that flash files contain scripting which may be abused for obtaining cookies, etc, from ImageHost.org users. That’s not a big issue now, but it could be once I finally get to adding a login system to the site.
Last, there was an issue with not-hotlinkable flash files (any SWF file over 1 MB) where they didn’t load. Apparently there is a conflict with the anti-leech protection somewhere that I still have to fix.
Anyway… I apologize for the inconvenience but on the short term I will probably not re-enable SWF files to be hosted in a normal way. Perhaps when I finally add a login system I might allow limited amounts of SWF files to uploaded by registered users (as afaik certain other image hosting sites do), but I can’t give you an ETA on that as it takes planning to implement a login system on a site that’s already “live”.
November 19th, 2008 at 02:03
I hear you on the fact that it takes planning to implement a ‘login’ system. In reality, you’ll need a ‘live copy’ elsewhere. Although, that is rather hard to do also. But none the less, it’s all fun!
Question, with your Digg submission, did you submit the image, or was it a user of the host that submitted the image…?
November 19th, 2008 at 06:49
A user uploaded that image & submitted it to Digg.
December 22nd, 2008 at 17:48
For the love of god, MUTE THE DAMN ADVERTS!
I realize why you need to place ads, i don’t mind them, i don’t block them. But if i hear that goddamn throbbing after accidentally rolling cursor over one of them i’ll punch my monitor.
Please, don’t let my monitor die like this.
Seriously, they are very irritating and can screw things up royally (i.e when i’m using mic, capturing video etc.).
January 13th, 2009 at 12:23
I have a got a ad blocker (Firefox Plugin) and like this I won’t see any ad.
Or shouldn’t I do that because I want to support ImageHost?