Bitcoin Forum

Several issues with how the forum handles images right now: Image hosts come and go, bitcointalk's image proxy isn't the very reliable, popular image hosts tend to delete controversial images.

I think that allowing base64 images to be posted could help solve those problems, at least for those willing to use the em.

bump, I guess.

What specifically would base64 images help?

If the image is hosted onto a website and the website goes down, the image would likely be removed from the post. If base64 was used it wouldn't matter if any website went down due to the image being hosted on here.

I think the problem comes in that it would take more effort to implement than it would be worth; very few users would use the base64 system. Perhaps suggest it in the New Forum Software (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=167.0) board, but don't get your hopes up.

Wouldn't that take up more resources (i.e. storage) for the forum?

Yes; base64 images are just huge blocks of code.

For example, the base64 for ;D is:
As you can imagine, the bigger the image the more base64 needed and the more needed to store.

That's true. Base64 increases the size of images nearly 30%, and if we wanted to cut off middlemen to take advantage of the pros I mention it should be hosted on the forum as text. Thing is, the forum is already storing quite a lot of text, base64 would likely end up being used by advanced users which imo wouldn't be a big percentage. The main advantage would be that images using base64 would stay up as long as the forum does, plus there's not going to be any need for proxying (which has proven to be unreliable).

In the spirit of decentralization I have to suggest that you host your own images. That will bypass the "image host come and go" and "image hosts tend to delete controversial images". I am not familiar with details around the image proxy, so that may still be a problem :P

Would there be a way that we could encode those images as text but not have to take up so much space? Something that makes it at least the size of the image, if not smaller, but definitely not bigger.

There are better ways to solve the problem than getting the forum to host the image for you via a hack. How about tor hidden services? Magnet links?

Images are big to begin with and jpg/png images are already compressed, so it's not like you can make it smaller. You can use more exotic encoding schemes to squeeze more bytes into a singe character, but that doesn't help much.

Tor hidden services aren't ideal for hosting and sharing content. I'm not sure about what you have in mind for image hosting, but from personal experience I'd say that .onion sites have a hard time competing with clearnet ones in terms of uptime and general reliability. Wouldn't it also require a "hack" to display images hosted using "hidden services" here?

As of magnet links, I could think of some issues but first of all, has a way to host and embed images using magnet links been developed yet?

I think the problem with both of those is that they would put more strain on the server than base64 would as they would require other software to work.
Using a tor hidden service would require some sort of mirror from darknet to clearnet (which is also unreliable; the majority of tor2web mirrors currently only work on certain browsers) and using a magnet link would require a torrent client to be not only getting the images available to view but seeding them to be sure that they do not die.

If we were allowed to host images directly on the forum there would already be a feature integrated within the forum. That's the exact same reason why the forum only accepts pictures from third party hosters. Mainly because of security reasons though...
"A picture says more than a thousand words" - that's true. Pictures can even take more space than millions of words to store on the server. And bitcointalk already needs to handle the "text" traffic and storage.
If we would start using base64 images all over the forum and let the forum store all the images, these images will get banned in no time.

And I really don't understand why people would want to let an image stay on a thread/post forever...

However, the forum could integrate an automatic system that uploads the image directly to imgur, etc and get the link instantly. (Like the browser extention I saw some time ago. I think it was Bitcointalk+ or something like that :/)

Might help with image hosting.

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