[dodgechargerfan]

I was hot linking some images today :erm: and thought that it would be great if I could use the URL in the hot-link to upload the image and then convert the URL to the locally hosted image.

A few googles later, I came across another way of saying the same thing: caching the hot-linked image locally.
Someone has done it for Wordpress and it is open code.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/...-image-cacher/

While I understand most of what's going on in the code, I don't think I have the chops to port the code to something that would work in vB4. (I haven't written a program from scratch in 20 years.)

So, I thought it would be a good request to make here.

Looking at the code, there's one thing that I think should be configurable is the upload directory. It's hard-coded in the Wordpress plug-in.

It should get called whenever a post is made so that it can do the caching right away.
It should also have the ability to go back through posts just like the WP plug-in does.

The WP plug-in can not reverse the caching. Once it's cached locally and the link is updated, that's it. There's no going back. I get that, but at the same time, I think there should be a means to preserve the original link. Rather than track stuff in yet another table, how about just adding a tag line to the image that says, "original image link: http://.............."
That keeps that information as part of the post and saves a query (I think) but it also preserves the information for the possibility of reversing things if ever the need should arise. It also preserves the link to the original content which is cyber-neighbourly.