Please create at your vBulletin board directory a folder called: imgcache and give it the following access rights: CHMOD 777 (read/write/modify to all users)
Create an empty index.html file in this folder to avoid file exploring and direct download on some systems.
Copy the y2kswimgcache.php file to your vBulletin board (forum home) directory.
Close your forum temporarily to the public.
Install the product product-y2kswimagecache.xml to your board (allow overwrite if already present).
The installer will add a table called '[prefix]y2ksw_imgcache' with one field (int ID AUTOINCREMENT) to your board database.
Please note: Although the uninstaller is provided, it is commented out. By removing the table, and reinstalling the plugin later, the cached images would be overwritten, because of the field counter restarting from 1.
By leaving the table in your database, you may reinstall the plugin later without collision problems.
Test the product: New thread, reply, edit. If errors occur (or white pages), make sure your imgcache/ folder has the required access rights.
Reopen your forum to the public.
DONE!
How it works
When a board user opens a new thread or message, or edits an existing one (all advanced, quick-reply and ajax), and pastes an image from all but the local cache directory (or by copy and paste, or by specifying [IMG] tags), upon submission the image is read from the external url and written to the local (server) image cache folder.
This avoids to show a placeholder image when the source link is dead or temporarily unavailable.
The link to the image is accordingly replaced.
The script scans first all image references and creates a table of unique images in the current message. It creates a new database table entry in y2ksw_imgcache for each image, reads the new ID and creates a sequence of new images for each url it happens to be readable, and creates for each successful read an imgcache/<id>.png file.
After this sequence, the files are cached locally and may disappear from their sources without leaving an unreferenced image pointer at the local board.
Known bugs
When an image link contains dynamic data, vBulletin would show the image in preview, but change also the IMG tags to URL.
This causes to loose the reference and the plugin will not attempt to recover. A possible solution is to allow dynamic contents for IMG tags on your board.
Version history
1.0.3.0 2007-08-19 Repaired browser (IE 7) issue for images of a different file extension than the officially recognized types. For this issue, newly cached files have now the *.png extension.
1.0.2.0 2006-08-27 Image caching of signatures ([IMG] tags for signatures must be enabled); added a donation button inside readme.htm for specific user requests, which will help us to keep this product always up-to-date.
1.0.1.2 2006-08-07 Release changes for vbulletin.org
1.0.1.1 2006-08-06 Image size verification to avoid caching of invalid images
1.0.1.0 2006-07-17 Collision-free unique cache ID's
1.0.0.0 2006-07-17 Product creation
Correct me if i'm wrong.
Saving a copy to the imgcache is only working with new posts ?
Old posts needs pressing the edit button and saving again ?
Is there a way to make that easier ? So every old post with linked pictures are stored in imgcache ?
A watermark option would be so very nice !!
On my gallery and vB attachments i already have it, now i only need it on linked images and allbums pics.
Correct me if i'm wrong.
Saving a copy to the imgcache is only working with new posts ?
Old posts needs pressing the edit button and saving again ?
Is there a way to make that easier ? So every old post with linked pictures are stored in imgcache ?
A watermark option would be so very nice !!
On my gallery and vB attachments i already have it, now i only need it on linked images and allbums pics.
I have somewhere also a procedure which imports old images from amost all kind of storages (incl. 3 different imageshack versions) but needs to be assisted a little and uses quite some resources. Also I'm lacking of time to supervise or explain it. It's only worth it to use if you have a dedicated server and may change PHP settings (timeout, no safe mode, memory usage). On shared servers it would have so many caveats that it probably will cause more problems than it solves.
But for a good start you could use this plugin
And oh well with vbulletin 3.5 there were no albums and so, thus really will save only pasted images of new posts...
Actually, i wanted to put images on another website (on the same server).
Something I think Yahoo! and Google follows for uploading their content images.
Yahoo!, for example have the website yimg.com which contains nearly most of the images displayed on Yahoo! and that fastens the loading speed of the parent Yahoo!, site I belive.
Having the images on the same website will consider them content images, and will slow forum.
Just found this hack thanks to Gasper. Are you going to update it to fix the bugs? This hack is what I am looking for, but has many issues that seem can be fixed to make it perfect.
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11-18-2008, 08:15 PM
