KerbalX.com - Craft & Mission Sharing

[swjr-swis]

On 2/3/2016 at 2:12 PM, katateochi said:

It would also be helpful to know how many people are being affected by this. I'm not sure if this is an ISP related problem or what so I'd be interesting to know if some people are unaffected.

Not sure if you want us to post about it or not... I hate to simply say 'me too' but not sure how else to show how many are affected.

I think the symptoms I'm seeing are the same others already have alerted you to:

• Thumbnails of my own craft are not showing on the dashboard, instead showing a broken link icon - this actually changed today after refreshing cache to showing only the imgur album ID in text. I use imgur albums as the front page image for my craft.
• Over half of the craft on the main page do not show an image for me. Of those that do show an image, it's (seemingly at random) the same two pictures show for all of them. This is multiple crafts from different users, it seems unlikely they really all use the same two pictures for their craft. The ones that don't show a picture have what looks like an imgur album ID in the top left corner, so may be the same issue as the dashboard thumbnails.
• When I change to https access and accept the heroku cert, it does shows the thumbnails on the dashboard, and some of the other craft images if they are single images, but no Youtube links and no imgur albums. Which leaves my craft pages with a big blank space aside from the text. Changing back to http reverts everything.

 

[katateochi]

37 minutes ago, swjr-swis said:

Not sure if you want us to post about it or not... I hate to simply say 'me too' but not sure how else to show how many are affected.

I think the symptoms I'm seeing are the same others already have alerted you to:

• Thumbnails of my own craft are not showing on the dashboard, instead showing a broken link icon - this actually changed today after refreshing cache to showing only the imgur album ID in text. I use imgur albums as the front page image for my craft.
• Over half of the craft on the main page do not show an image for me. Of those that do show an image, it's (seemingly at random) the same two pictures show for all of them. This is multiple crafts from different users, it seems unlikely they really all use the same two pictures for their craft. The ones that don't show a picture have what looks like an imgur album ID in the top left corner, so may be the same issue as the dashboard thumbnails.
• When I change to https access and accept the heroku cert, it does shows the thumbnails on the dashboard, and some of the other craft images if they are single images, but no Youtube links and no imgur albums. Which leaves my craft pages with a big blank space aside from the text. Changing back to http reverts everything.

 

When I asked that I didn't know what the problem was. I do now and I'm working to get it fixed.

The images that you see loading are hosted on sites other than imgur, or (in the case of the two same images) they are the place holder images for craft which don't have their own image (and those images are no longer on imgur so they are showing).

Access via https breaks imgur albums and youtube vids because with the site running with SSL encryption it blocks the loading for content from non-encrypted sources.  When you return to http access, the images which loaded while you were on https will have been cached so your browser is just returning those cached images.

BUT try your craft now via https.  I've just run a database migration to update all embedded youtubes and imgur albums to use the ssl url.  So now accessing the site via https should be showing all content.  New albums/vids will be added with https urls from now on.  

So I think we're back to limping at least, not ideal using the https route while the site doesn't have it's own certificate because of the warnings that generates, but it's a patch for now until I hear back from imgur.  Still waiting on a response from them (darn timezones!).  

 

[swjr-swis]

29 minutes ago, katateochi said:

BUT try your craft now via https.  I've just run a database migration to update all embedded youtubes and imgur albums to use the ssl url.  So now accessing the site via https should be showing all content.  New albums/vids will be added with https urls from now on.  

So I think we're back to limping at least, not ideal using the https route while the site doesn't have it's own certificate because of the warnings that generates, but it's a patch for now until I hear back from imgur.  Still waiting on a response from them (darn timezones!).

Tested, and yes, the imgur albums do show now on https.

I would be totally fine with the site using a self-signed certificate, btw. It's not like we're doing anything security-sensitive on the site.

[katateochi]

4 hours ago, swjr-swis said:

Tested, and yes, the imgur albums do show now on https.

I would be totally fine with the site using a self-signed certificate, btw. It's not like we're doing anything security-sensitive on the site.

I think most folk would be too, but the cost of getting a certificate isn't that much (20 bucks per year), but self-signed or otherwise I'd also have to pay for SSL end_points on my host and that is more costly (20 bucks per month).  The problem I have is that I can't be certain that imgur won't block the https url too, although unless I've completely misunderstood their TOS I don't think they will as I have fixed everything to be in compliance, but still I'd rather have a response from them before going further.  But it's been 14 hours since my last message to them and I've not had a response. So I'm not sure whats going on right now.

[katateochi]

So this imgur problem has rather overshadowed a quite big update to KX which was released just prior to this, so... carrying on as if all is normal;

I've done a big overhaul to the mod tracking aspect and the way KX reads the CKAN repo.  A couple of bug fixes around ordering mod version numbers (that was a bit of a brain teaser!) but the most apparent change is that KX no longer ignores partless mods, it now tracks all mods known to CKAN.  Having KX know about partless mods doesn't do anything for it's mod detection abilities (some of the other fixes have tightened that up a bit more though) but it does make the ModPack feature more useful.  

ModPacks give you a way to create a custom group of mods which you can easily share and with partless mods now being tracked, you can create mods packs that contain all the mods that you use or like.  If you use CKAN you can drop your installed-defaults.ckan file onto a mod pack and have it automatically list all your installed mods.  All mod packs have a .ckan file you can download and give to CKAN to instruct it to install all the mods from that mod pack (that was there before, just been improved by having more mods available).  

You can also select one of your ModPacks to be your "current setup".  This does a couple things;
1) Your current setup mod pack is always accessible via a set url <your_username>/installed_mods ie: https://kerbalx.com/katateochi/installed_mods so you can put you current setup url in a post or in your sig and then if you add or remove mods or even change to a different mod pack you don't have to update that url.  
2) It tells KerbalX what mods you're currently running with and as you browse craft you will see a little "compatible" label displayed in the header section of craft that will work on your setup.  
3) It gives you a one-click way of loading your current mods into the search filters on the main page.

When you're on a craft's page, if you click on the user menu and go to MyStuff -> ModPacks you can switch which mod pack is your current setup and the craft's "compatible" label will update accordingly.  If you create a new ModPack while on a craft page the ModPack will automatically be loaded with the mods used by that craft.

 

Anyway that's what I'd been doing just before this imgur image problem cropped up and I'd not even got round to saying anything about it.  I still have not heard back from imgur and I guess but this point I won't until next week. I'll keep you updated as I know more.
 

[katateochi]

Still no reply from imgur. I'm going to give them till tomorrow and then I'll start a new support request.  

[katateochi]

well still no word from Imgur  
I will mail them tomorrow.

But even with the image problems, site traffic is about the same and folk are still uploading.  In fact; 
we just hit 6000 craft!! 
So thanks to everyone for sticking with me while things are not ideal.  

[swjr-swis]

36 minutes ago, katateochi said:

we just hit 6000 craft!! 
So thanks to everyone for sticking with me while things are not ideal.  

Just wait until "It's over 9000!"

ok sorry, that just had to come out. I'll go now.

[Val]

 

15 hours ago, katateochi said:

we just hit 6000 craft!! 

Gratz!

So my 29 crafts are ~0.5% of the total. Hmm, humbling and encouraging at the same time.

 

15 hours ago, swjr-swis said:

Just wait until "It's over 9000!"

Well, I just passed 3000 downloads of my crafts, since my first upload on 2015-08-09.

Add that to kat's 6000 and that makes it over 9000!!! 

[katateochi]

26 minutes ago, Val said:

Well, I just passed 3000 downloads of my crafts, since my first upload on 2015-08-09.

nice 1! 3000 copies of your craft roaming the vastness of space with different pilots at their helm.  Quite a nice thought really.

Actually (going of the database ID numbers) the total number of craft that have been uploaded is 9700, but some have been deleted (and I think some peps just upload and then delete right away as a way of checking what mods their craft use, sneaky users ).

Some more stats;
- Since Aug 2014 when KerbalX first went online there have been 504,745 craft downloaded from the site! I need to put that number up on the site....the site stats page need some love. 
- We're now tracking 1393 mods (of which 1204 are available via CKAN) and a total of 12,047 parts!  
- The total part count of all 6000+ craft combined is 713,586 
- Mod craft slightly outnumber stock craft by 247 (3131 Modded - 2884 Pure Stock) - which is the most surprising figure to me, I didn't expect it to be that close.
- The top 10 most used mods (excluding Squad/stock parts which KX treats as mod) are in order; TweakScale, BahamutoD's Armory, Ferram Aerospace Research, Adjustable Landing Gear, TweakableEverything, MechJeb 2, Kerbal Aircraft Expansion, B9 Aerospace Pack, KW Rocketry, B9 Procedural Parts (TS, TE, and FAR might be a bit of an error, I know some craft don't need them but they've added their modules to the craft so they get counted, an improvement to that is in the pipe).
- And 2908 users have signed up, 47% of which have uploaded craft.

 

[swjr-swis]

3 hours ago, katateochi said:

Some more stats;

Always interesting to see stats like these. Find a good spot on the site to place them!

[luizopiloto]

I'm surprised that ppl still download my old crafts for old versions of KSP... like that 1024 parts Polar Bear craft... was the first craft I uploaded to KX... for KSP 0.24.2

PS: Some of my crafts depends of Stock Bug Fixes & Stock Plus mod to work 100%... isn't there a way to detect it?

Edited February 11, 2016 by luizopiloto

[katateochi]

On 10/02/2016 at 6:45 PM, swjr-swis said:

Always interesting to see stats like these. Find a good spot on the site to place them!

Done!! https://kerbalx.com/statistics 
(that page was there before, but kinda horrible and didn't really show much, been meaning to update it for a while)

6 hours ago, luizopiloto said:

I'm surprised that ppl still download my old crafts for old versions of KSP... like that 1024 parts Polar Bear craft... was the first craft I uploaded to KX... for KSP 0.24.2

well, that craft does take epic to new levels!! I remember when you posted it! If you sort the craft by part count, it appears on the first page of results which might be why you are still getting hits on it.
I still get downloads on this old clunker which was the first ever craft on the site! If anyone hits the invert sort button when sorted by date it pops right up.

 

Update on the imgur problem
After over a week since I first contacted imgur (and several more emails from me) I've had a reply, it's not particularly helpful.  They think that KerbalX is still using imgur as a CDN (content delivery network) and gave me a link to one craft page as example of a page they thought was at fault.  All the images loaded from imgur on that page are part of the post made by the craft's uploader, which is no different to me posting that pic above on here, or they are thumbnails to other posts by the same user.  As far as I can tell KerbalX is doing nothing wrong, yet it has been completely hobbled by imgur.  

I've sent yet another email with annotated screenshots of the page they used as an example, highlighting what was user content and what was site content and showing how each of the images that come from imgur are part of users posts or are thumbnails to posts. even sent a shot of the edit page so they can see that the images are added with BBcode style tags.  

I'm trying to be as transparent and straight up with them as I can and provide any info that might help, but they just don't respond.  And when they do it's like some neurone deficient script monkey just read the title of my message and mashed 'send stock response' (to be fair, it at least got my name right this time).  I'm pretty darn angry! I've been an imgurian for years, got the t-shirt, got high notoriety etc, and I took pride in the fact my site was encouraging some new imgur users......[angry rant deleted]

I need help guys, I don't know what to do. I'm in the process of moving the KX to proper SSL which will make things work for now (and without certificate warnings), but if, as it seems, they are mistaking user content for site content then that won't hold, they'll eventually block that too.  It should at least buy me more time to try and get sense out of imgur, and investigate alternatives. The problem is I'm not in control of where the images are hosted, that's up to all you guys. And while I'm angry enough to say "boycott imgur!", that's not a solution that will work for everyone.  The more of you who do shift host the better though (at least your images will continue to show) and I will spend some time this weekend looking at which of the others would be best (any suggestions welcome please, ones with unrestricted hot-linking allowed are what we need).

One option, but I need to look into the cost a bit more, is to build a Amazon AWS backed image host into KerbalX and manage the hosting of images myself (a feature that's always been on my never going to happen list, oh well).  So with that you could upload images direct to KerbalX, but still there will be people who've already uploaded to imgur and will see having to upload images twice as a hastle.  I may be able to automatically mirror images that are hosted on imgur, but if KerbalX is totally blocked I'll have to get sneaky and use a proxy to pull the images via a different domain.  And (the point I care more about) how would you as users feel about KerbalX automatically mirroring images that you post?
Anyway, I'm still looking into other solutions and as I said the proper SSL certification will buy me some more time to do that, but any ideas you guys have would really help.

 

 

 

[Val]

4 hours ago, katateochi said:

Done!! https://kerbalx.com/statistics 
(that page was there before, but kinda horrible and didn't really show much, been meaning to update it for a while)

Ooh! I like this. So many interesting stats.

Would it be possible to also include a Top 10 for uploads in the last 30 days? Could also add top downloaded crafts in the last 30 days, top users, whose crafts have been downloaded.

 

I hope everything goes well with imgur *crosses fingers*

[swjr-swis]

11 hours ago, katateochi said:

https://kerbalx.com/statistics 

• 6,029 craft
• The combined part count of all craft is 714,997
• (a total of 6,384 struts have been used!)

Two things I learned from the stats:

• I guess I'll never have all the craft in one single savegame.
• The struts count must be a lie!

 

11 hours ago, katateochi said:

how would you as users feel about KerbalX automatically mirroring images that you post?

I consider screenshots posted on imgur as 'publicly out there' anyway, so I have no problem with that, especially when it'd be used for the intended purpose.

One thing I wondered: does it make any difference to use single image links vs. albums? Is either one considered more or less of an 'infraction' by imgur? I've been using a single album ID per craft, to minimize the links back to imgur per initial page load (I imagine that 'next' images of an album are only loaded when the next button is clicked, but maybe I'm wrong). For me that's fine and minimizes the hassle of uploading a craft, but I've seen more elaborate pages that use several images in more complex formatting, so having to stick to just one method will affect at least some users either way.

[swjr-swis]

11 hours ago, katateochi said:

One option, but I need to look into the cost a bit more, is to build a Amazon AWS backed image host into KerbalX and manage the hosting of images myself

One other thing: keep in mind that even a single image can easily be 2-20x the size of the craft file - just checking at my screenshots (png) and corresponding craft files, seems to average around 10x (~2MB png for a ~200KB craft). A couple of images per craft, or a whole album... and your hosting needs explode. Let's say 10 images per craft, ~120MB on disk, couple dozen views per craft...

It would keep things under your own control, no dependency on others, but do some numbers and know what you're getting yourself into.

[katateochi]

7 hours ago, Val said:

Ooh! I like this. So many interesting stats.

Would it be possible to also include a Top 10 for uploads in the last 30 days? Could also add top downloaded crafts in the last 30 days, top users, whose crafts have been downloaded.

I hope everything goes well with imgur *crosses fingers*

Before the imgur problems I'd been thinking of adding that as a sort option on the main search page.  Previously I didn't track the dates when craft were viewed and downloaded, but since the new dashboard was added that data is there.  So there will be something like most downloaded this [year, month, week]

The imgur debacle continues! I've said this to you on chat, but for everyone else; for now all traffic is being routed to the backup url https://kerbalx.herokuapp.com which means everything is working as normal.  When the SSL cert is ready (within 24 hours) then we'll be back on https://KerbalX.com

 

38 minutes ago, swjr-swis said:

Two things I learned from the stats:

• I guess I'll never have all the craft in one single savegame.
• The struts count must be a lie!

One day when we all have personal quantum computers maybe then KSP could handle having 700k parts all loaded up at the same time
yeah I thought that was a bit low too.  The logic is that I select all parts with the word "strut" in their name (which is like 130 parts) and then select all craft that........oh wait....I think I call distinct on the DB select, so that's actually 6,300+ instances of strut use, ie if you craft that used 2 different type of struts and 100's of them it would still only count as two.  That's whats happening, it's counting the now many strut types are used per craft, not how many total struts.  I'll fix that! 

 

33 minutes ago, swjr-swis said:

One other thing: keep in mind that even a single image......

The setup that KerbalX runs on would in no way be able to hack hosting the images.  It's got a fast 64GB database which should do for hosting craft for a long time to come, but adding images to that would kill it, never mind the bandwidth and load on the servers. What I would do is use Amazon-AWS as the backend for the images, so the storage and bandwidth load is all on Amazon's servers (which are monsters) and KX would essentially just link to the images as if they where on any other image host.  The difference being that KX would be able to control uploads and downloads directly.  
The pricing for AWS is pretty awesome and I think from looking at it, the first year will be free.  Storage costs are like $0.0300 per GB(!) for the first TB and then it goes down a bit for each 50 subsequent TBs, then there's costs for each type of request, here's their pricing https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ (can anyone spot any traps?)

The thing I need to try and work out is not just the ave. number of pics per craft * ave number of views per month, it's also got to include those images being hot-linked on here, reddit and other places.  Basically a rough guess of what the traffic will be.  I need some stats for this forum, like ave. views per thread per day and ave pics per thread, just roughly to get an idea, any idea how I can get those?
Also as I'd be hosting the images I need to make sure nothing unsavoury is being stuffed into my image hosting service but I think that if the rule is; any image you drop on a craft page, gets hosted, any image you remove from a craft page gets deleted, then it's just moderation of KX as normal.  
Anyway more pondering needed, but this is actually looking quite feasible, but my brain has blown a fuse for this stuff for today, so I'm out, gonna go play some games!

 

 

[swjr-swis]

36 minutes ago, katateochi said:

my brain has blown a fuse for this stuff for today, so I'm out, gonna go play some games!

Go do that first. Ze fun is important to keep ze productivity up.

 

38 minutes ago, katateochi said:

here's their pricing https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ (can anyone spot any traps?)

I'll have a look at this when I get back and let you know if I see any Ackbars.

 

38 minutes ago, katateochi said:

I need some stats for this forum, like ave. views per thread per day and ave pics per thread, just roughly to get an idea, any idea how I can get those?

I couldn't find anything other than the couple of numbers on the front page of the forum, and it doesn't include those.

You could try ask @KasperVld very nicelike; if forum regulations, tools, and his time budget allow, he'd probably be your best bet to get some indicative numbers.

[katateochi]

We're fully SSL'd up! And back on the proper domain https://KerbalX.com 

I've also had the first actually meaningful reply from imgur.  It seems that their problem is that I display thumbnails.  So it's fine to post full res images and as many as you like on a page, but taking one of those images at the low res version and displaying thumbnails isn't.  

So apparently imgur will be happy if I store the thumbnails.  Well that's going to happen anyway with building an image host as part of KX. By the end of this, what we should have is;
- support for imgur images as we have now
- thumbnails will be generated from whatever image source is used and stored in the KX image host
- and the ability to upload images directly to KX
- hot-linking images on KX image host for use on the forum/reddit etc 
- cake

What I think I will do is have it so it is free to upload images to post them on your craft pages (so no change there).
But if you want to also store other images which aren't displayed on craft pages it will cost something like $1 per year (ie if you want to use KX to store all your KSP screenshots to post in other places).
I'm not 100% sure about allowing hot-linking (although I might not actually be able to control that), images hotlinked to places like reddit could cause quite a load but the pricing of AWS S3 looks friendly enough that I'm not too worried.  So for now that's in the specs.
Roughly speaking, if 30GB of images are stored, 30,000 images are uploaded and 5 million request are made on those images that comes to a staggering ~$3 per month.  so.....I think I can eat that.
 

KerbalX image host. what a dull name. any better suggestions? crafty-images, rocket-snap?

 

I totally forgot to reply to this;

19 hours ago, swjr-swis said:

One thing I wondered: does it make any difference to use single image links vs. albums?

I don't think so. the person I spoke to said something about using the embed codes, but that didn't make sense in the context.  From what I understand from it, content provided by users is ok, but not when used as thumbnails.  Then in the same sentence as saying I can't have a page like the front page with imgur hosted thumbnails they then say something about a user using the embed codes and that that's ok (which I found confusing). 
Actually here's their latest reply;

Spoiler

Thanks for the information! Looking over the site, with the link exampled previously: http://kerbalx.com/shonennick/SatelliteLaunchPack

The content provided by the user is allowed as stated by our Terms of Service (http://imgur.com/tos). Unfortunately, when the content is also used as the thumbnails for the rest of the site, this does present issue of imgur being used as a CDN since they are a site element.

To give an example, the front page of your website is using the links provided by the users as the thumbnail. The thumbnails could be generated within your servers and provided to the community. Unless this is changed, unfortunately we are unable to unblock the website. Taking a look at some users, they are using the provided embed code to show their content: http://kerbalx.com/trevize1138/Cyclonus-Lux This does not break the TOS, and allows your community to continue to use imgur to share their content.

Let me know if you have any further questions; I'd be happy to help.

 

[Val]

17 minutes ago, katateochi said:

We're fully SSL'd up! And back on the proper domain https://KerbalX.com 

Gratz! 

And good to see imgur finally made a constructive reply.

[pellinor]

On 12.2.2016 at 4:20 AM, katateochi said:

Done!! https://kerbalx.com/statistics 
(that page was there before, but kinda horrible and didn't really show much, been meaning to update it for a while)

I just stumbled on the remark that TweakScale is detected too often. You can compare the values currentScale and defaultScale in the TweakScale module. If they are equal then the part is unscaled and the module can be ignored.

[swjr-swis]

21 hours ago, katateochi said:

here's their pricing https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ (can anyone spot any traps?)

I checked it out, I didn't see anything that triggered alarms. I noticed they also have a reduced redundancy offering... may or may not be interesting to start off.
 

1 hour ago, katateochi said:

I don't think so. the person I spoke to said something about using the embed codes, but that didn't make sense in the context.  From what I understand from it, content provided by users is ok, but not when used as thumbnails.  Then in the same sentence as saying I can't have a page like the front page with imgur hosted thumbnails they then say something about a user using the embed codes and that that's ok (which I found confusing).

I read the reply. They seem to consider the frontpage thumbnails 'content', even though they're really just the link to the user provided page/images. Doesn't make much sense to me either.

So if you generate the thumbnails locally it should be resolved. That's a lot better than having to rehost full images and albums altogether, and you get to standardize and control the size of the thumbnails.

 

1 hour ago, katateochi said:

- cake

Bah, the cake is a lie...

 

1 hour ago, katateochi said:

Roughly speaking, if 30GB of images are stored, 30,000 images are uploaded and 5 million request are made on those images that comes to a staggering ~$3 per month.  so.....I think I can eat that.

I went and punted you about a staggering year's worth of test time for this. Keep us informed on how this develops. I don't mind contributing to a good service.

 

2 hours ago, katateochi said:

KerbalX image host. what a dull name. any better suggestions? crafty-images, rocket-snap?

How about the PixelStrut? Or MoarPixels. InstaCraft? (Oww! Ok I deserved that bop.) Erhm... actually, why not simply 'space'? That's ultimately where we want most of our craft to go anyway, and it's fitting.

 

[katateochi]

2 hours ago, pellinor said:

I just stumbled on the remark that TweakScale is detected too often. You can compare the values currentScale and defaultScale in the TweakScale module. If they are equal then the part is unscaled and the module can be ignored.

I should have said Tweakable Everything was the one I was having issues with.  You're right on about TweakScale; and yes comparing those values is what I do.  It's Tweakable Everything that's tricky, it doesn't have anything I can use to do a comparison like with TE (atleast last time I checked).  Same is true of FAR. All I can do with those is check if certain modules are present.  I might need to talk to the devs of those mods and ask if they can add something in that I can detect.  unless you know of something I've missed in those modules.  
Detecting "partless mods" is an area that's on my list to revisit and improve, but I gotta this image thing and some other bits sorted first.  

 

1 hour ago, swjr-swis said:

So if you generate the thumbnails locally it should be resolved. That's a lot better than having to rehost full images and albums altogether, and you get to standardize and control the size of the thumbnails.

indeed, overall this will make things better.  

2 hours ago, swjr-swis said:

Bah, the cake is a lie...

1 hour ago, swjr-swis said:

I went and punted you about a staggering year's worth of test time for this. Keep us informed on how this develops. I don't mind contributing to a good service.

Dude, you are awesome. Thank you very much.  
 

I feel bad that I don't know the forum names or KX usernames of everyone who has donated, so I can't say thanks to everyone on here.  9 people have sent donations, but I only know the forum identity of 3, and while I do get the name of the person who sends the donation I won't disclose that or what was donated.  But the 3 I do know;

@adsii1970 has been a long time supporter and sends a monthly donation! He was actually one of the first to send a donation and is standing by to become the first KX moderator when I get a system in place for that.
@Val and @swjr-swis have both recently made very generous contributions.  I also can't thank you two enough for your moral support over this whole imgur mess.  It's meant a lot to me.

And the other 6, whoever you are in the Kerbal world, I hope you've received my emails 'cos I really do think you guys are awesome for helping me keep KX running. 
Most of you are people I've never met, never spoken to even, but you're helping me out and that is legendary! 

[swjr-swis]

Meh, all I was looking for was a place online where I could make my craft files available, in a way and at conditions suiting me. Very importantly, I wanted no registration/login wall for anyone that randomly wants to download one of my craft. Dropbox almost did this right, but then it goes popping up a very annoying 'login or register' reminder every other click.

I like the way KerbalX works, it offers perks very specific and useful for showcasing craft, there's a nice active group of uploaders, and it has an active maintainer. Worth all the support, so thanks @katateochi, all donators, and all users that make the place alive by uploading awesome creations.

[swjr-swis]

2 hours ago, katateochi said:

Actually the hardest thing is going to be going back over the existing craft and grabbing their thumbnail images and storing them.  

Imgur's made that harder because of the block I can't actually do it off the site, and also that would put quite a load over everything

(abusing the forum quote block to quote from your e-mail)

I've been thinking about the thumbnail issue. I know compared to some others I only have a handful of craft uploaded, and my proposal may not make me popular, but it seems to me that to maintain a working relationship with imgur some choices need to be made anyway, so here goes:

My suggestion would be to not try to do this retroactively in one large 'update' action. I keep thinking about the automatic extra gotcha imgur keeps throwing up when I even upload a few dozen pics as part of a single album - if they sort of object even at that, I can't imagine their reaction at a sustained download of thousands of images, even if you do it from another system than the server.

It would be a bit of work for each user, but why not 'simply' (he says, sitting comfily in his non-maintainer chair) add one more field in the craft upload form where you ask for an image or url to an image specifically to be used as a thumbnail? In the meantime, use a placeholder.

I think there are a few benefits over one large update action:

• No risk of triggering imgur alarms, because the thumbnail images, if offered through an URL, are only accessed a single time when uploading (or updating) the craft page - and the update will be spread out instead of in one big surge.
• Users get to pick a specific image to be used as thumbnail. The reason this is a benefit is that for those of us that use imgur albums for the craft page, the very first image on the album may not be our favourite choice for a thumbnail. I for one would appreciate a separate pick for use as thumbnail.
• I can't see this mass update thing being an easily automated task for you, I hate to see you have to spend an inordinate amount of time on chasing thumbnails, when we could do this ourselves with a relatively small effort to the upload/update form.

Worst case if you get complaints, tell them it was my idea. I can handle a rotten tomato or two.