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Meta Stack Exchange has announced their roadmap to serving and uploading HTTPS images. Any images already uploaded to Stack Exchange's Imgur site will be automatically converted. Those that are linked to external sites will be made link-only.

After [https] is enabled, old posts that have HTTP images, accessible via HTTPS, will be edited accordingly. This will be an actual markdown change, attributed to the Community user, posts won't be bumped.

We'd like to prevent this from happening. Let's take the time to update our questions to point to HTTPS versions of our questions. Other sites, such as SciFi/Fantasy Stack Exchange, are undergoing similar efforts. This will unfortunately bump a lot of questions to the front page, but I think that this effort is best in the long run.

This Stack Exchange Data Explorer query should find all of them. At the time of this writing, there are 26 questions needing attention, so it's not a huge effort.

It looks to me like the majority of external HTTP images are for Magic cards. Unfortunately, none of the sites, (including Wizards' own Gatherer) support HTTPS at this time. Fortunately, we can upload them via the Stack Exchange image uploader, which will automatically future-proof them, as well as make sure they will still exist if the external site goes down.

Speaking of which, it does look like we have a few cases of the external site going down with these images. For instance, I found Hex board game strategy had an externally hosted image to a website that no longer existed. Fortunately, I was able to find it on Archive.org from a few years ago and was able to upload it to Stack Exchange's Imgur.

So to recap:

  • Find images that are externally hosted via HTTP
  • Either find HTTPS equivalents or upload them via the Stack Exchange image uploader (I think that uploading to SE would be preferable, in case the external link goes down)
  • If the external link is dead, try to find an old copy on Archive.org or elsewhere
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  • FYI, I've been working on this by using the SEDE query, then sorting by number of views and working from top to bottom. Thus the ones more popular are more likely to have already been corrected. There are a few scattered ones I corrected before realizing I could sort.
    – Thunderforge
    Mar 10, 2017 at 1:45
  • For Magic card images, I'd favor just linking to the card, the way most questions do, and quoting the rules text or the relevant part of it if necessary. Generally it's not that important that the actual image be there.
    – Cascabel
    Mar 10, 2017 at 1:48
  • @Jefromi I don't play Magic and so am less familiar with how the Magic questions on this site usually work, but I'd be fine with that. Feel free to edit out the pictures from any of them, including the ones I'd already switched to HTTPS (they should be on the front page).
    – Thunderforge
    Mar 10, 2017 at 1:50
  • Okay, sure. Do you want to also just copy the query results into an answer here so you/we can mark what we've fixed?
    – Cascabel
    Mar 10, 2017 at 1:52
  • SEDE is off of data dumps, I think weekly, so yeah, it's unfortunately not usable for iteration like this.
    – Cascabel
    Mar 10, 2017 at 1:53
  • I can work something out, one minute...
    – Cascabel
    Mar 10, 2017 at 2:05

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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Done. All external HTTP images have been reuploaded or removed.

Here's everything that SEDE query returns. We can move things into the top section as we take care of them.

Completed:

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  • Is it worth dividing the "Completed" into ones where we've reuploaded the image and ones where we removed the image entirely?
    – Thunderforge
    Mar 10, 2017 at 2:26
  • I wouldn't worry too much, unless you think you want someone else to look at it. The goal here is just to fix things.
    – Cascabel
    Mar 10, 2017 at 2:27
  • I guess that's all of them? We're done with this?
    – Thunderforge
    Mar 10, 2017 at 2:45
  • Looks like it! Thanks for getting us started and doing so many of them.
    – Cascabel
    Mar 10, 2017 at 2:50
  • And thank you for all of your help with creating the list and completing so many others!
    – Thunderforge
    Mar 10, 2017 at 2:50

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