Whew, it’s been a long time since the last post to this blog – way to long. As a result there is a ton I could write about, such as the new server that went operational last month. The most important change at the moment however is that some anti-abuse measures were implemented today that may affect your usage of the site.

This weekend ImageHost.org was hit by a spam attack, whereby a spammer used automated scripts to uploaded thousands of images to use in spam emails. I had hoped this kind of abuse was a thing of the past, as while the site got hit a few times by such attacks in 2004, this is the first time this happened since the relaunch in late 2007.

To avoid such attacks in the future several measures have been taken to make it significantly harder for automated scripts to upload images. To avoid being hit by these as a legitimate user, make sure you have cookies enabled and allow cookies for the imagehost.org domain. Most browsers should be configured this way by default. Second, make sure you always use the main www.imagehost.org site to upload new images.

If you follow these two guidelines, you should not notice a thing from these new measures and you can use the site as usual.

The ability to hotlink to images is an important part of ImageHost.org. However some users have been abusing this feature by hotlinking to large full size images from very active message boards. For this reason I’ve tweaked the hotlinking rules to discourage this practice. Any image you want to hotlink to now needs to be less than 250 KB in size and the image’s resolution needs to be less than 1000×1000 pixels.

These new limits should hardly bother anyone wanting to use ImageHost to hotlink to an avatar or signature, but will prevent users from hotlinking to say, their wallpaper collection. You can of course still upload images that go over these limits, but you will need to use thumbnail or text links instead.

I realize there may be users who just want to share their images and don’t know or can’t be bothered with resizing those images to acceptible sizes, so I’ve added a resize feature to my “to do” list. Once this feature is done, you can have ImageHost.org resize the images to acceptible size after upload for you. Unfortunately I can not give an ETA on this feature though.

Update March 13: It seems a pretty major bug caused hotlinking to images of any size or resolution to be not allowed, which confused one important ImageHost.org user (my mother) a lot. This bug has now been fixed – I apologize for any inconvinience caused. In addition I’ve upped the limits a bit (500 KB & 1600×16000 pixels), so only considerably large images will not be eligable for hotlinking.

Update March 23: Received some complaints, hotlinking is currently back to old limits again.

It’s been a long while since my last post – to long. There are several reasons for this. One of them is that there were few issues to report: for the most part everything kept working reasonably well in November and December. Only in the past few weeks some performance issues started popping up again.

The current problem with performance mainly lies into finding out how to properly balance new uploads between the two servers used to serve the more than 3 million files that have been uploaded so far. Right now the server to which files are being uploaded to is hardcoded. I’ve got some ideas about how to have the scripts make the choice between servers more intelligently.

Unfortunately I don’t have the opportunity to make major changes to the scripts in the past few weeks. It’s not that I don’t have the time – I got lots actually, but I recently moved and my broadband connection is yet to be reconnected. This makes doing any kind of development frustrating for me.

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A few days ago somebody uploaded an image and hotlinked to it from Digg.com, where it made the frontpage! But after it had accumalated 2GB of datatransfer in a single hour the image was promptly disabled, Doh! The bandwidth limits (300MB for files that are exclusively being hotlinked to) are there to stop people from abusing ImageHost.org, but of course I don’t want to impede the linking of files from sites like Digg.com and other major sites.

For this reason I’ve added a “whitelist” of sites where even if you hotlink to files & cause lots of datatransfer, the image won’t get disabled. Sites in the whitelist include Digg (of course), MySpace, Facebook, Orkut, Slashdot, LinkedIn and eBay, amonst others. If you still find a file is being disabled for using to much bandwidth when you are hotlinking from a major site (with millions of visitors), drop me a line and I’ll add it to the list if I find the site suitable. Btw, if you use thumbnails or text links to link to your files then bandwidth limits do not apply.

I really should post more often, as then I won’t have to cram to much topics into a single post. Anyway, some news: the “new” server I was talking about in previous posts has been performing well and seems to be able to much better handle the load, even at full 100mbps (10MB/sec) speeds. That it is reaching these speeds meant one other thing though: yet another server was needed to balance the growing need for more bandwidth. The new server has been delivered, but it’ll take some time to setup properly. Expect it to go live later this month.

I’ve also fixed a rather major bug in the bandwidth limit rules, or rather the data the bandwidth limits act upon. If you upload a file to ImageHost.org, it has a hourly bandwidth limit of 300MB per hour. If it goes over this limit in a single hour, the file is deleted. This limit however only applies if you are hotlinking to the file: if you properly use thumbnails or text links to link back to ImageHost.org, the file is not subject to this limit and could potentially use much more bandwidth: even gigabytes of bandwidth per hour is allowed that way.

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Previously there was a “news” page for information regarding ImageHost.org, but as there was no convinient interface for editing this page, I hardly updated it. WIth this new blog, I can log in from anywhere at any time to post news and status updates about ImageHost.org. Plus you can also comment on any news posted. Note that to prevent spam from being posted, all comments are moderated.