Pic8 is dogshit
Agreed.
The concept is nice, it just isn't being implemented correctly in my uneducated opinion. Why the fuck would you upload a picture to several different image hosts, and only allow users to be directed to just ONE and only ONE-and it could the broken one.
There needs to be a way to select a WORKING image host for a given image when that host goes down.
How many more times will we have to endure half of Poal's content being dead links via pic8 before that's fixed? The issue is well known and has been for quite some time.
Why the fuck would you upload a picture to several different image hosts, and only allow users to be directed to just ONE and only ONE-and it could the broken one.
If you allow a full directory of all image hosts a given image is replicated on, it makes it very easy for outside parties to scrub an images from the web, because they'll know exactly where it is hosted. Defeats the purpose of pic8 being an image archive.
You are correct about the implementation being rather poor. Read the About page of pic8 sometime. Maintaining the site is alot of work. Years of effort. I've got a full time job and all the other life stuff.
Am more than happy to receive suggestions for improvements on the site. Including any additional anonymous image hosts anyone comes across; however, I have not received many of those. Usually just people complaining because the site doesn't solve world hunger, or whatever.
Thank you so much for responding.
Was actually thinking about this on the way to work this morning... believe it or not...
I live in the embedded programming world, but have limited knowledge about internet shit, so forgive my ignorance. Would it not be possible to have some sort of script check the accessibility of links, perhaps once an hour? Then switch to serving up another host when a particular one cannot be accessed. But this wouldn't work 100% if it's one of those situations where the link becomes inaccessible to certain groups of users for a period of time.
Another thing I thought of is serving up a different link to same image for every request, maybe round-robin or randomized, but you're trying to avoid someone being able to discern the full host directory of a given image. In that case, maybe only use 1/4, 1/2, or 3/4 etc, of the total actual hosts.
One more thing would be to be able to force a different host by inserting something into the URL, but that also could give away all of the image hosts if all of them are available.
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