Administrative and Maintenance Tools - Import External Images

This vBulletin 4 product imports external images in your posts from external servers or paths into a specific path, normally your forum's image folder.

Differently than the previous product Image Cache for vBulletin 3.x., it parses the posts at regular intervals for new images and replaces the external references in the background. Also, instead of using only a single folder, it creates folders for years and months, making it much easier to handle large quantities of images. The source and destination image URL's are stored into database, too, avoiding unnecessary duplicates.

It moves and optionally converts images from one place to another. It is a handy tool in order to keep your images local to your forums.

Version 1.0.4 is temporarily in BETA stage until the users have confirmed the newly requested features.
Version 1.0.5 is still in BETA stage. It adds a new bunch of additional features, one of which allows you to test your mathematical understanding ... and a few other to fine-tune CURL and socket timeouts, and resizing on the fly of too large images. If you don't know what these options do, please leave them at their default values.

[xyd]

I'll add a little more in response later today as I only have a few seconds at this very moment, but I wanted to mention something right now at least, regarding this:

Originally Posted by BadgerDog

Nice initiative, but at $120/year, it sounds expensive when this mod does a similar job for the single one time price of a PayPal donation?

If you went ahead, it would also have to be an SSL site..

Regards,
Doug

I agree, the service wouldn't be for everyone - a lot of people like self hosting (I myself am one of those people) - and perhaps there would be a self-hosted version I'd make available, but to provide the level of service I want to with such a mod/plugin/whatever you want to call it, being able to fully administrate the infrastructure is something that I see, personally, as being important to me as the developer.

In regards to it being ran on HTTPS, I entirely agree. In fact, it's something I strongly believe in so much that I wouldn't even give the option to disable SSL for the service. Some could argue that having images behind SSL could cause extra round trip time due to SSL negotiation, but these images being served from a CDN would clear that up for most forum operators - and in a lot of situations, even being behind SSL but served with a CDN images would still load faster due to not a lot of places using CDNs for forum images/attachments.

That, along with all of the other newer technologies that increase loading time (HTTP/2 etc), would all be enabled, and again, such extreme performance optimizations aren't as common on forums as we'd all prefer. I am extremely... paranoid, or obsessive... when it comes to optimization when it comes to delivery of web objects.

SSL is becoming a very important aspect to the web these days, and I'd sweeten the pot for those who would use this service if I do end up creating it (I'm looking to create a few services for forum owners actually, this one included)... by allowing the site owner to choose the subdomain they wish to have their images served from, and thus creating, utilizing and issuing (yes, giving you the actual cert to utilize on your site however you want) a wildcard SSL certificate (signed by GlobalSign's AlphaSSL CA) for your domain for free.

Will add a little bit more later when I get back.

[BadgerDog]

Originally Posted by xyd

I agree, the service wouldn't be for everyone - a lot of people like self hosting (I myself am one of those people) - and perhaps there would be a self-hosted version I'd make available, but to provide the level of service I want to with such a mod/plugin/whatever you want to call it, being able to fully administrate the infrastructure is something that I see, personally, as being important to me as the developer.

Paying one time for a functional commercial product that would enable self hosting would be something we'd be interested in .. :up:

Thanks ..

Regards,
Doug

[RichieBoy67]

Ok, well this thread is for this mod..

Can anyone tell me why Tapatalk images do not import. I believe they used to but I am not sure. It could have to do with their https:// url change or ours but I really want those images on our server..

[djbaxter]

Why would the cron job for this task suddenly stop logging events?

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by djbaxter

Why would the cron job for this task suddenly stop logging events?

If PHP silently crashes, for example.

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by RichieBoy67

Ok, well this thread is for this mod..

Can anyone tell me why Tapatalk images do not import. I believe they used to but I am not sure. It could have to do with their https:// url change or ours but I really want those images on our server..

Maybe ... you have no CURL? fopen() is somewhat limited with https.

[djbaxter]

Originally Posted by djbaxter

Why would the cron job for this task suddenly stop logging events?

Originally Posted by y2ksw

If PHP silently crashes, for example.

I'm not sure what you mean by "silently crashes". I haven't seen anything to suggest anything crashed in server alerts. But assuming this might happen, what is the resolution? Server reboot?

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by djbaxter

I'm not sure what you mean by "silently crashes". I haven't seen anything to suggest anything crashed in server alerts. But assuming this might happen, what is the resolution? Server reboot?

If PHP crashes silently then there is no notification anywhere and the causes are unknown. We have had silent crashes with huge images (such as 60.000x80.000 pixel). The solution is to mark that post as "scanned ok" and eventually exclude the specific image in the options, if it appears in more than one post.

[djbaxter]

Originally Posted by y2ksw

If PHP crashes silently then there is no notification anywhere and the causes are unknown. We have had silent crashes with huge images (such as 60.000x80.000 pixel). The solution is to mark that post as "scanned ok" and eventually exclude the specific image in the options, if it appears in more than one post.

How do you mark it as "scanned ok"? How do you even know which image to do that for if there's no notification and if the add-on is no longer logging its activity?

[RichieBoy67]

I just checked and this does not appear to be working at all any more.. no changes to the settings or plug in but updated Vbulletin, changed php version..things like that. Vbulletin 4.2.4 beta 1..also changed site to https://

Cron tasks says done but nothing happens..