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If you guys do want an alternative, I'm struggling to get MediaCrush [1] more popular. It's a lot better [2], but imgur is imgur. The hardest part is that Reddi

If you guys do want an alternative, I'm struggling to get MediaCrush [1] more popular. It's a lot better [2], but imgur is imgur. The hardest part is that Reddit (admins and moderators, that is) is actively supportive of imgur and actively hostile towards alternatives. [1] https://mediacru.sh https://mediacru.sh [2] https://blog.mediacru.sh/2013/07/19/MediaCrush-for-nerds.html https://blog.mediacru.sh/2013/07/19/MediaCrush-for-nerds.htm...

Mizza 13y ago
I found a bug: http://i.imgur.com/AvcOQXE.png http://i.imgur.com/AvcOQXE.png (I wasn't trying to be snarky by using imgur - it's just that you guys don't allow paste from clipboard yet and I'm on linux)
- Sir_Cmpwn 13y ago
  Which browser? I'm on Linux and you can paste URLs on Chromium. Not on Firefox. Pasting images is half done.
  - Mizza 13y ago
    That's not the bug. The bug is that it says 'undefined'
    - Sir_Cmpwn 13y ago
      Well, in any case, I need some steps to reproduce if I hope to fix it.
    - jdiez17 13y ago
      It might be because we use `window.location.origin` to determine the media URL. This[1] post on StackOverflow suggest that only browsers based on Webkit or FF 21 and higher have it. What browser are you using? Can you please file an issue on GitHub[2] with as much information as possible so we can look into it? [1] http://stackoverflow.com/a/6167979/379195 http://stackoverflow.com/a/6167979/379195 [2] https://github.com/MediaCrush/MediaCrush/issues https://github.com/MediaCrush/MediaCrush/issues
pferde 13y ago
Looks nice enough, thanks! One thing, though - I was looking for a way to get to a file upload dialog, and I missed "click to browse", because I thought at first it will take me to a page where I can browse already uploaded images. Perhaps "click to upload" or something like that would be better. Good luck!
- Sir_Cmpwn 13y ago
  Good suggestion, I'll do that.
ferongr 13y ago
I like it. imgur breaks with click-to-play plugins (you have to activate a hidden object manually) and the commenting functionality and association with reddit put me off from using it.
thristian 13y ago
Oh boy, a site that automatically does GIF->MP4 transcoding! One of the nice things about imgur, though, is that once you've uploaded an image it gives you a nice handy preview page where you can do things like add a heading above the image or a caption below it, and gives you sample HTML and bbcode to copy and paste to embed the image on your own site. If you could do that, especially if the HTML code used <video> with the GIF in an <img> as fallback, I imagine that would be pretty sweet. I agree that redditors on the whole are pretty supportive of imgur, but a good part of that is because Imgur is very trusted: it got an initial burst of trust by being (a) from reddit and (b) better than the alternatives, and it's continued to repay that trust with interest in the intervening years. That's not to say that other sites can't or won't be better, just that (as I'm sure you've found) other sites will have an awfully steep hill to climb unless they're mind-blowingly better, or Imgur somehow shoots itself in the foot (by disabling hot-linking, or requiring Facebook authentication to upload images, etc.)
- Sir_Cmpwn 13y ago
  We used to fallback to GIF in the <video> tag, but Chrome would completely load the GIF before it even started on the videos. Albums are coming in the somewhat near future, and you'll be able to caption them. Also, the developer docs [1] document the easy-to-use embedding tool for putting them in your own websites, but maybe we should make that more visible. [1] https://mediacru.sh/docs/ https://mediacru.sh/docs/
  - thristian 13y ago
    Yeah, I have frequently uploaded screenshots to Imgur and copy/pasted the embedding sample to a web-forum or whatever, so it would be handy to have that in the human-reachable portion of the site, rather than only in the API. Also, I was talking about MediaCrush with a friend just now, and he pointed out that nowhere in MediaCrush's ToS does it mention anything about deleting images other than by legal pressure. Imgur says they'll delete images after three months without a hit; MediaCrush doesn't say that, but it doesn't not say it either.
    - 13y ago
kodr 13y ago
A few suggestions: - try to contact honestbleeps from the RES subreddit [1] and see if he can add MediaCrush support in RES to expand images from posts - add file extension to the URL, it may help with some extension like HoverZoom or script [2]. [1] http://www.reddit.com/r/Enhancement/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Enhancement/ [2] http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/109262 http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/109262 edit: nvm, it works if I add the extension myself, but it would be great to add that to the URL when you upload a file.
- Sir_Cmpwn 13y ago
  We've had RES support since day one. We contacted him a while back. As for HoverZoom, we don't really want to be involved with them [1]. We considered it, but decided against seeking their support. [1] http://www.reddit.com/r/MediaCrush/comments/1k1sb7/announcing_mediacrush_a_site_for_super_fast_media/cblf4qh http://www.reddit.com/r/MediaCrush/comments/1k1sb7/announcin...
VMG 13y ago
Minor point from the blog: > The only thing we store about you is your hashed IP address when you upload a gif. It's impossible for us to get your original IP address from this. What algorithm do you use? It's not that hard to brute force all 2^32 IPv4 addresses with SHA2 -- (even less if you exclude improbable ones)
- kefka 13y ago
  Let me tell you a little secret: Apache has these things called logs that can "reveal" the IP address of another computer. And so can the evil hacker tool 'netstat'. Do you trust this service or not? Don't trifle around with stupid shit like this.
  - lotyrin 13y ago
    What if he's not being paranoid, but instead pointing out how paranoid and flawed the concept he has pointed out is?
  - Sir_Cmpwn 13y ago
    We're running on nginx, and we told it not to log IPs. You'll obviously have to take our word for it. Even if you don't take our word for it, it's no worse than most other sites, which do log your IP. EDIT: Or you can run a self-hosted instance of MediaCrush, it's open source: https://github.com/MediaCrush/MediaCrush https://github.com/MediaCrush/MediaCrush
    - kefka 13y ago
      That was precisely my point: TCP doesn't work with a spoofed IP connection while maintaining state. So you usually have to use your IP address or a middleman like TOR or a proxy. And then you have to trust the endpoint: you. And frankly, I get sick of the undue and infinity-about paranoia. It gets tiring hearing again and again.
  - VMG 13y ago
    The scenario described in the blog is an attacker gaining access to the database containing the IP hashes.
kmfrk 13y ago
Dude, could you make it any harder to follow your project? Give us a Twitter profile or RSS feed. I had almost already forgotten about the existence of your service.
- Sir_Cmpwn 13y ago
  @mediacru_sh
k3n 13y ago
> The hardest part is that Reddit (admins and moderators, that is) is actively supportive of imgur and actively hostile towards alternatives. While I won't argue that they're supportive of imgur, do you have any evidence of them being hostile towards your service? I just went to your page, and I was in the midst of critiquing your design when it occurred to me that the elements I had the largest problem with....were actually ads[1]. Ads that were inserted in such a way that I had no idea they were ads... IMO this is a terrible thing. Not only does it make your landing page trashy, it can (as I'm evidence of) easily confuse even the most seasoned of users. There is zero contextual information to signal that it was an ad, and only after clicking one of the 'buttons' did it occur to me that it wasn't a part of your site. So I almost get the feeling of being deceived into clicking an ad, and that puts a very bad taste in my mouth. I don't think that was your intention, to trick people into clicking ads, but when that's what happens I'm going to blame the site for allowing it to happen. Do note that imgur doesn't have any ads on imgur.com. Some of the other reasons why I prefer imgur over your site: * shorter URL * dark background All else being equal (feature parity for my needs), those 2 things will keep me on imgur. I hate white backgrounds (superficial I know, but preferences are preferences), and shorter urls are simply better for practically every use. While I applaud your drive, the site looks like a imgur-copycat making a money-grab (due to the prominent & intrusive ads) in a fresh market. 1. https://mediacru.sh/4y6bAzy9_bti https://mediacru.sh/4y6bAzy9_bti
- Sir_Cmpwn 13y ago
  Please tell me how I can make the ads less intrusive. I was under the impression that we had done them right. There's even a link to forever opt-out of ads without a second thought. >Do note that imgur doesn't have any ads on imgur.com. ...yes they do.
  - k3n 13y ago
    > Please tell me how I can make the ads less intrusive. Can you show me the visual demarcation on your page between the ad and your content? > > Do note that imgur doesn't have any ads on imgur.com. > ...yes they do. My mistake, one of my extensions blocked it. However, a few things to note about their ad vs. yours, which contributes to my perception of your page being confusioning (and making it look less reputable): * imgur's ad is below-the-fold, while yours is not. That inherently makes theirs more of a 2nd-class citizen, while for yours the ad is a 1st-class citizen. * imgur's is in it's own, well-defined UI element; a bounded box clearly separated from all other content on the page. As hinted above, yours allows the ad to flow into the rest of the page, and it even borrows the main color (blue) that your page uses. Any demarcation is only virtual, as there is no visual distinction, and I'm not sure if you could blend the ad into the page any better if you tried... * imgur's even says "advertisement" underneath, so as to remove practically any chance of confusion. Yours has "click here to disable ads", but that alone doesn't explicitly call out the content as being an ad. Please don't take my criticisms personally.
consultant23522 13y ago
To be fair, Reddit has been bitten by several image hosts before doing nasty things like botting up-votes to increase their traffic. It's not surprising they're skeptical of new hosts.
ben0x539 13y ago
Not a fan of how direct links to images always result in a download prompt. Also the branding seems kinda outdated - two-word phrase with an inner capital letter, meh. And the URLs feel kinda long, even with the clever "putting part of your name into the tld" thing. Between that kind of minor quibbles and my expectation that imgur is probably going to stay around for longer than your service is, I'm afraid I'm going to stick to imgur for my cat-related labeling-and-distribution needs. I'm more interested in getting people to share short bits of video as small video files instead of huge gif files, but I don't think cartoons are a good showcase for that, even with the dramatic file size reduction. Compression artifacts are pretty visible with all the line art and fairly flat colors. (edit: and of course you're going against the flow of all the social websites, going back to web forums all the way to tumblr, where embedding gifs is trivial but videos are a big deal/require youtube/their own posts.) Good luck, though!

Mizza 13y ago

I found a bug: http://i.imgur.com/AvcOQXE.png http://i.imgur.com/AvcOQXE.png (I wasn't trying to be snarky by using imgur - it's just that you guys don't allow paste from clipboard yet and I'm on linux)

Sir_Cmpwn 13y ago
Which browser? I'm on Linux and you can paste URLs on Chromium. Not on Firefox. Pasting images is half done.
- Mizza 13y ago
  That's not the bug. The bug is that it says 'undefined'
  - Sir_Cmpwn 13y ago
    Well, in any case, I need some steps to reproduce if I hope to fix it.
  - jdiez17 13y ago
    It might be because we use `window.location.origin` to determine the media URL. This[1] post on StackOverflow suggest that only browsers based on Webkit or FF 21 and higher have it. What browser are you using? Can you please file an issue on GitHub[2] with as much information as possible so we can look into it? [1] http://stackoverflow.com/a/6167979/379195 http://stackoverflow.com/a/6167979/379195 [2] https://github.com/MediaCrush/MediaCrush/issues https://github.com/MediaCrush/MediaCrush/issues

pferde 13y ago

Looks nice enough, thanks! One thing, though - I was looking for a way to get to a file upload dialog, and I missed "click to browse", because I thought at first it will take me to a page where I can browse already uploaded images. Perhaps "click to upload" or something like that would be better. Good luck!

Sir_Cmpwn 13y ago
Good suggestion, I'll do that.

ferongr 13y ago

I like it. imgur breaks with click-to-play plugins (you have to activate a hidden object manually) and the commenting functionality and association with reddit put me off from using it.

thristian 13y ago

Oh boy, a site that automatically does GIF->MP4 transcoding! One of the nice things about imgur, though, is that once you've uploaded an image it gives you a nice handy preview page where you can do things like add a heading above the image or a caption below it, and gives you sample HTML and bbcode to copy and paste to embed the image on your own site. If you could do that, especially if the HTML code used <video> with the GIF in an <img> as fallback, I imagine that would be pretty sweet. I agree that redditors on the whole are pretty supportive of imgur, but a good part of that is because Imgur is very trusted: it got an initial burst of trust by being (a) from reddit and (b) better than the alternatives, and it's continued to repay that trust with interest in the intervening years. That's not to say that other sites can't or won't be better, just that (as I'm sure you've found) other sites will have an awfully steep hill to climb unless they're mind-blowingly better, or Imgur somehow shoots itself in the foot (by disabling hot-linking, or requiring Facebook authentication to upload images, etc.)

Sir_Cmpwn 13y ago
We used to fallback to GIF in the <video> tag, but Chrome would completely load the GIF before it even started on the videos. Albums are coming in the somewhat near future, and you'll be able to caption them. Also, the developer docs [1] document the easy-to-use embedding tool for putting them in your own websites, but maybe we should make that more visible. [1] https://mediacru.sh/docs/ https://mediacru.sh/docs/
- thristian 13y ago
  Yeah, I have frequently uploaded screenshots to Imgur and copy/pasted the embedding sample to a web-forum or whatever, so it would be handy to have that in the human-reachable portion of the site, rather than only in the API. Also, I was talking about MediaCrush with a friend just now, and he pointed out that nowhere in MediaCrush's ToS does it mention anything about deleting images other than by legal pressure. Imgur says they'll delete images after three months without a hit; MediaCrush doesn't say that, but it doesn't not say it either.
  - 13y ago

kodr 13y ago

A few suggestions: - try to contact honestbleeps from the RES subreddit [1] and see if he can add MediaCrush support in RES to expand images from posts - add file extension to the URL, it may help with some extension like HoverZoom or script [2]. [1] http://www.reddit.com/r/Enhancement/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Enhancement/ [2] http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/109262 http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/109262 edit: nvm, it works if I add the extension myself, but it would be great to add that to the URL when you upload a file.

Sir_Cmpwn 13y ago
We've had RES support since day one. We contacted him a while back. As for HoverZoom, we don't really want to be involved with them [1]. We considered it, but decided against seeking their support. [1] http://www.reddit.com/r/MediaCrush/comments/1k1sb7/announcing_mediacrush_a_site_for_super_fast_media/cblf4qh http://www.reddit.com/r/MediaCrush/comments/1k1sb7/announcin...

VMG 13y ago

Minor point from the blog: > The only thing we store about you is your hashed IP address when you upload a gif. It's impossible for us to get your original IP address from this. What algorithm do you use? It's not that hard to brute force all 2^32 IPv4 addresses with SHA2 -- (even less if you exclude improbable ones)

kefka 13y ago
Let me tell you a little secret: Apache has these things called logs that can "reveal" the IP address of another computer. And so can the evil hacker tool 'netstat'. Do you trust this service or not? Don't trifle around with stupid shit like this.
- lotyrin 13y ago
  What if he's not being paranoid, but instead pointing out how paranoid and flawed the concept he has pointed out is?
- Sir_Cmpwn 13y ago
  We're running on nginx, and we told it not to log IPs. You'll obviously have to take our word for it. Even if you don't take our word for it, it's no worse than most other sites, which do log your IP. EDIT: Or you can run a self-hosted instance of MediaCrush, it's open source: https://github.com/MediaCrush/MediaCrush https://github.com/MediaCrush/MediaCrush
  - kefka 13y ago
    That was precisely my point: TCP doesn't work with a spoofed IP connection while maintaining state. So you usually have to use your IP address or a middleman like TOR or a proxy. And then you have to trust the endpoint: you. And frankly, I get sick of the undue and infinity-about paranoia. It gets tiring hearing again and again.
- VMG 13y ago
  The scenario described in the blog is an attacker gaining access to the database containing the IP hashes.

kmfrk 13y ago

Dude, could you make it any harder to follow your project? Give us a Twitter profile or RSS feed. I had almost already forgotten about the existence of your service.

Sir_Cmpwn 13y ago
@mediacru_sh

k3n 13y ago

> The hardest part is that Reddit (admins and moderators, that is) is actively supportive of imgur and actively hostile towards alternatives. While I won't argue that they're supportive of imgur, do you have any evidence of them being hostile towards your service? I just went to your page, and I was in the midst of critiquing your design when it occurred to me that the elements I had the largest problem with....were actually ads[1]. Ads that were inserted in such a way that I had no idea they were ads... IMO this is a terrible thing. Not only does it make your landing page trashy, it can (as I'm evidence of) easily confuse even the most seasoned of users. There is zero contextual information to signal that it was an ad, and only after clicking one of the 'buttons' did it occur to me that it wasn't a part of your site. So I almost get the feeling of being deceived into clicking an ad, and that puts a very bad taste in my mouth. I don't think that was your intention, to trick people into clicking ads, but when that's what happens I'm going to blame the site for allowing it to happen. Do note that imgur doesn't have any ads on imgur.com. Some of the other reasons why I prefer imgur over your site: * shorter URL * dark background All else being equal (feature parity for my needs), those 2 things will keep me on imgur. I hate white backgrounds (superficial I know, but preferences are preferences), and shorter urls are simply better for practically every use. While I applaud your drive, the site looks like a imgur-copycat making a money-grab (due to the prominent & intrusive ads) in a fresh market. 1. https://mediacru.sh/4y6bAzy9_bti https://mediacru.sh/4y6bAzy9_bti

Sir_Cmpwn 13y ago
Please tell me how I can make the ads less intrusive. I was under the impression that we had done them right. There's even a link to forever opt-out of ads without a second thought. >Do note that imgur doesn't have any ads on imgur.com. ...yes they do.
- k3n 13y ago
  > Please tell me how I can make the ads less intrusive. Can you show me the visual demarcation on your page between the ad and your content? > > Do note that imgur doesn't have any ads on imgur.com. > ...yes they do. My mistake, one of my extensions blocked it. However, a few things to note about their ad vs. yours, which contributes to my perception of your page being confusioning (and making it look less reputable): * imgur's ad is below-the-fold, while yours is not. That inherently makes theirs more of a 2nd-class citizen, while for yours the ad is a 1st-class citizen. * imgur's is in it's own, well-defined UI element; a bounded box clearly separated from all other content on the page. As hinted above, yours allows the ad to flow into the rest of the page, and it even borrows the main color (blue) that your page uses. Any demarcation is only virtual, as there is no visual distinction, and I'm not sure if you could blend the ad into the page any better if you tried... * imgur's even says "advertisement" underneath, so as to remove practically any chance of confusion. Yours has "click here to disable ads", but that alone doesn't explicitly call out the content as being an ad. Please don't take my criticisms personally.

consultant23522 13y ago

To be fair, Reddit has been bitten by several image hosts before doing nasty things like botting up-votes to increase their traffic. It's not surprising they're skeptical of new hosts.

ben0x539 13y ago

Not a fan of how direct links to images always result in a download prompt. Also the branding seems kinda outdated - two-word phrase with an inner capital letter, meh. And the URLs feel kinda long, even with the clever "putting part of your name into the tld" thing. Between that kind of minor quibbles and my expectation that imgur is probably going to stay around for longer than your service is, I'm afraid I'm going to stick to imgur for my cat-related labeling-and-distribution needs. I'm more interested in getting people to share short bits of video as small video files instead of huge gif files, but I don't think cartoons are a good showcase for that, even with the dramatic file size reduction. Compression artifacts are pretty visible with all the line art and fairly flat colors. (edit: and of course you're going against the flow of all the social websites, going back to web forums all the way to tumblr, where embedding gifs is trivial but videos are a big deal/require youtube/their own posts.) Good luck, though!