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GTPlanet is now using a new image proxy system to serve all images posted on the forums. This means that any image image you share or "hotlink" in a post (without uploading it as an attachment to that post) will be automatically and transparently copied to and served back to you from GTPlanet's servers. A copy of each image will be stored for 7 days, after which the servers will fetch a new copy of the image from the original host. (As of December 1, 2018, proxied images are cached by GTPlanet indefinitely.)
Although this will have no significant impact on how most of you use the site every day, there are a few things you should know about it, how it works, and why it was implemented:
Although this will have no significant impact on how most of you use the site every day, there are a few things you should know about it, how it works, and why it was implemented:
- Improved Security & Privacy - Serving all content from GTPlanet means that spammers and other shady characters cannot track our visitors and cannot use "cookie stuffing" techniques. This also prevents someone from embedding extremely large images which can crash your browser or needlessly consume your bandwidth - a very important factor, especially if you are on a mobile network (images cannot exceed 10MB).
- Faster Image Loading - Because all images are being served directly from GTPlanet's infrastructure, they may be loaded faster than they would from their original source. And, if you've already viewed the image before, it will be served directly from your browser's cache so you won't have to download it again.
- No More "Malware" Warnings - Sometimes, when users post images on GTPlanet from websites which may have been hacked or compromised, other visitor's browsers would display a scary, bright red splash screen proclaiming that GTPlanet contained embedded content from "known malware distributors", or something along those lines. Although this never actually represented a security threat (because embedded image files are mostly harmless), it was a regular occurrence and a frequent topic here in the Site Support forum - not to mention an irritating clean-up job for myself and our moderators. These warnings will no longer be an issue.
- No More "Bandwidth Exceeded" Placeholder Images - Some image hosting services place a cap on how much bandwidth an image can consume (or how many times it could be viewed), and when that is exceeded, everyone sees some type of error message instead of the picture. Because GTPlanet's server makes only one request every seven days to the origin and the image is served from our infrastructure the rest of the time, we won't be contributing to its bandwidth usage and the image can stay online for everyone to see on GTPlanet.
- Dynamic Image Countdowns/Timers - "countdown" images which are dynamically generated will not function as expected here, because GTPlanet's server only retrieves the image once every seven days.
- Custom Dynamic Images - If you are hosting an image on your own server and then changing that image for it to be displayed in your thread, note that the image will not refresh until it expires from GTPlanet's cache in at least 7 days. You can change the file name to display the new changes, or, if you're using Dropbox, you can send me a private message for information on another alternative method.
- Large Animated GIFs or Photos - Any image over 10MB will not be cached by GTPlanet and will instead show an error image, like the one you see below. This is a very large image, anyway, and could crash mobile devices, older computers, and several of these images could quickly consume someone's limited bandwidth. Instead, please link directly to these types of images instead of embedding them.
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