Imgur to delete all content not tied to an account, especially old content, on May 15th. Potentially catastrophic for the forums!

[DAL59]

https://help.imgur.com/hc/en-us/articles/14415587638029-Imgur-Terms-of-Service-Update-April-19-2023-

"We will be focused on removing old, unused, and inactive content that is not tied to a user account."

Just like the Photobucket 2017 nuke but on a far larger scale.

I for one never used an imgur account and uploaded all images anonymously, meaning all my forum posts with embedded images will be gone , and I'm sure many other users probably hosted photos on imgur without an account.

This will brick large parts of the forums! 

I can't really think of a solution, other than a bot with moderator perms that scrapes the entire forum, downloads all imgur images, then edits each post with a new image uploaded to another site.

Edited April 21, 2023 by DAL59

[Geonovast]

I wonder what their definition of "inactive" is.  Hotlinking, so loading while viewing a forum, may be considered activity and so the only images on the forum that would go poof are in threads that literally aren't even read anymore.

[DAL59]

3 minutes ago, Geonovast said:

I wonder what their definition of "inactive" is.  Hotlinking, so loading while viewing a forum, may be considered activity and so the only images on the forum that would go poof are in threads that literally aren't even read anymore.

Yeah, it would be very much appreciated if they would clarify how "active" something needs to be. Does an anonymous upload need 10,000 views or just 10 to be exempt from deletion? How recently does the last interaction need to be?  

[tg626]

I have accounts, but I also use Greenshot which does the anon upload thing, so some of mine may go poof unless loading from the forum counts.

OTOH I've seen this before, here and elsewhere, images go poof. Some posts get seriously damaged from the lack of visuals. Some dont.

But it doesn't brick anything.

[Gargamel]

I believe this is intended as a NSFW purge that’s happening over there.   This is just another avenue to allow them to delete material of questionable content.    Whether they will be mass deleting items not associated with an account regardless of content remains to be seen.