[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by tommythejoat

My moderators are reporting problems with this feature. It appears that images are being replaced with the wrong, seemingly random image.

I spent some time looking at the iei_img table and the post table with the following results.

We have 798,156 posts.
23,105 of the posts contain at least one IMG bbcode.
25,859 are marked iei_parsed.

In the iei_img table we have 34,257 records.
Of these 20,420 saved images are mapping unique external images.
We have 11,015 records with our web root (forum) directory as the saved entry (no jpg)
The big problem is 911 of the save images map multiple external images with as many as 204 references down to 2 references.

Other than restoring my backups from before I installed iei, I do not know how to recover the erroneous image mappings.

I do not really understand how the batches are managed while importing images. It appears that it is not working correctly.

We are running 4.2.1 with iei 1.0.5

If the "missing/invalid" image replacement is disabled, the original links are maintained, when this product is unable to import an image. For this reason it is most probable that random images are still within the img tags, since those are unlikely to work, ever. For example, some sites don't allow hot linking, and thus put junk redirects on line. Then this product wants to import them and sees, it can't. If missing images are replaced, it will typically use clear.gif or something alike to replace the missing image. Else, it will leave the link intact, and it may work for a while, until this kind of images disappear from source.

There is nothing I can do about it, this is how Internet works.

You may reparse all or part of the posts setting the iei_parsed flag to 0. Some sites do allow hot linking after a while and so you may get them later. I've been using this product over many years now on large production sites and we have had a number of problems, which were all related to remote images. Some of which were WORM infected, some where hotlink protected and others just would not conform to the standards. But these are few exceptions out of thousands of imported images every month.