Error messages when posting

[sooo]

This is the part I don't understand. Say a photo's size, as you say, is 40K. It's on Flickr, and it's taking up 40K's worth of space on Flickr's servers. If I downloaded it to my computer, it would take up 40K on my hard drive, too. I understand that if we use the "From URL" option to display that photo on Clarity, it's not taking up any space on Clarity's server's hard drive. But what still confuses me is that in order for the photo to be displayed here in posts, doesn't there have to be 40K's worth of communication between Clarity and Flickr?

First, you're not downloading the image to your computer's hard drive, but if you did, yes, it would take up the same amount of space... unless let's say you used the same feature in a Word document or similar program, which also has a link feature (the same global link symbol in the tools bar), in which case, so long as you were connected to the internet, opening the document would view the image from the web source, same as here. But that's not on your hard drive unless you chose to save it to there.

Second, whether here or there, no, you're only downloading and opening the link, not transferring the actual image file to this server, or your hard drive, unless you choose to on your hard drive. Hilary chooses not to on her server's allotted hard drive space.

Maybe someone more techy can explain it better, but that's the layman's way of explaining it.

And it's no problem, Lisa, glad to help.

 

[Liselle]

Second, whether here or there, no, you're only downloading and opening the link, not transferring the actual image file to this server, or your hard drive

so long as you were connected to the internet, opening the document would view the image from the web source, same as here

Is this it - am I understanding it? :

If we use the "From URL" option in the Insert Images function (to display, say, a 40K image), it's only using 40K of internet chatter bandwidth when someone loads the page (thread) it's displayed on? Whereas if we use the "From Computer" option, it's taking up 40K of Clarity's server space all the time, whether anyone is looking at it or not?

If that's right, I wonder if there would be some way for Hilary to actually disable the "From Computer" option. Someone like me, who's never gotten this explanation and doesn't already understand how the internet works , would just figure if they want to display a photo from their computer, and there is a "From Computer" option sitting right there to use, they should use it. From my own experience, it doesn't work as expected (images mysteriously change to links), which adds a double whammy of exasperation without giving any indication of cause and effect. It never occurred to me that my images were disappearing because of the option I selected in "Insert Images." I thought it was a VBulletin bug, my browser, an internet goblin, or some such thing.

Thank you so much for taking the time to work this out with me . Now I know how (and if Trojina reads this, she'll know how, too ).

 

[sooo]

Um, well, sorta, except there's not 40k of chatter flying through the air, it's only making use of software which in addition to providing a link, also displays the content of that link. I could be mistaken, but I don't think that there's significant bandwidth loss, gain or exchange involved. It just opens the link in a different field, i.e. on a thread here.

I think Hilary doesn't disable the function of uploading from our computers because she does allow us to utilize that function sometimes, such as when we upload an image of ourselves to our profile or avatar directly from our hard drive.

 

[Liselle]

I performed housekeeping, and deleted all the photos I've uploaded to the server here (there weren't terribly many). In the future I can use one of several web hosting options I already have - Microsoft OneDrive, Flickr, etc. - and the "From URL" option.

Thank you again for explaining this to me, Sooo - how it works, what is a better way to do things...

 

[sooo]

You're most welcome, Lisa. :bows:

Oh, you probably know you can also post from any web image the same way. It doesn't have to be from your storage site.

 

[Liselle]

Oh, you probably know you can also post from any web image the same way. It doesn't have to be from your storage site.

Well, no, I hadn't actually thought that far, but it does makes sense - any URL from any website which ends with an image file extension (.jpg, .png, etc.), right? (For the Insert Image function.)

 

[Liselle]

Oh, you probably know you can also post from any web image the same way. It doesn't have to be from your storage site.

Well, no, I hadn't actually thought that far, but it does makes sense - any URL from any website which ends with an image file extension (.jpg, .png, etc.), right? (For the Insert Image function.)

 

[hilary]

I think Sooo knows more about posting images here than I do.

About the error messages - Vbulletin support say 'does the problem still occur with the default skin and no add-ons?' This is code for, 'We can't offer any support until you change back to the default skin and deactivate all your add-ons.' Which I suppose is understandable - I expect the majority of problems they hear about are self-inflicted - but for us it might be a bit of a sledgehammer vs nut kind of solution.

I haven't had the duplicate post/ error message problem for a while - have you? (There were a lot of database connectivity errors on the 14th-15th when the error messages were proliferating like bunnies. I suspect that would be it - a server glitch.)

Pressing 'post quick reply' with some trepidation...

 

[sooo]

Lisa, as far as I know, you can copy (pinch, as Hilary used to call it) any image that isn't protected by security software, as some artists' sites may be, for example. There may be other file exceptions as well, for example I just tried to post Hilary's avatar here as an example but it doesn't work. Not sure why.

Hilary, there's no doubt often user error is involved, but lately some peculiar things have happened regularly. You might notice an unusual number of duplicate posts, such as one of Lisa's, just in front of yours, unless she's already deleted one of them. That's happened to me too quite often lately. You click to post, there's a fairly long wait, then an error message, so you click again to find that both times worked, despite the error message and you now have a double post. But not always. If you get confident that the first one took, and leave your posting text page, it may not have gone to post, and unless you copied it, it's gone; backspacing won't work. Just fwiw.

 

[sooo]

There it worked. User error, I pasted image link rather than image location by accident.

 

[Liselle]

About the error messages - Vbulletin support say 'does the problem still occur with the default skin and no add-ons?' This is code for, 'We can't offer any support until you change back to the default skin and deactivate all your add-ons.' Which I suppose is understandable - I expect the majority of problems they hear about are self-inflicted - but for us it might be a bit of a sledgehammer vs nut kind of solution.

This is code for "We don't care and won't deal with it." There are several versions of that song amongst computer people. (Maybe I'm being overly cynical.)

But no, we do not want to lose our skin and add-ons. Not that I know what those are, but it sounds like a cure-worse-than-disease solution. It's easy enough to ignore the errors and to delete duplicate posts when they happen - and if it was a passing glitch, easier still.

Thank you for looking into it, Hilary .

 

[Liselle]

Ah - and there is Trojina's distinctive crab, pinched from her profile page. Success! (And no posting errors on either of these posts - maybe the storm has passed, hooray.)

(Edited) Oh, and I see the image URLs don't have to end in an image file extension. What's between the IMG tags for Trojina's avatar is just this, with no .jpg or .png at the end:

http://www.onlineclarity.co.uk/friends/image.php?u=1123&dateline=1395628637&type=thumb

Put mouse pointer over the image, right click, select Copy Image Location (that's what it's called in Firefox), then paste what's copied into the box in the Insert Image dialog. Very simple, once you know .

 

[hilary]

Well, I have told the Vb people that the problem also happens when I'm using their default mobile theme - which it does - and that it started by itself with no change in add-ons. Hopefully that will be enough for them to offer some support.

I imagine that slowness of connection leads to error messages and duplicate posts whether that slowness is at the user end or server end. In other words, it may be pretty hard to say where the problem is, when. But if several of us are running into the same issue, that makes it more likely to be server-side.

Bah. Should have mentioned this thread in 'Friends' Notes' to see how many people have the same problem. Bother.

 

[hilary]

About images - please be diplomatic about copying locations from other people's websites. You're right, that will tax their bandwidth, not mine, every time someone views it - and the owner might not be happy.

 

[sooo]

About images - please be diplomatic about copying locations from other people's websites. You're right, that will tax their bandwidth, not mine, every time someone views it - and the owner might not be happy.

Hm, didn't realize this. Will look into it more. Most of my more obscure images come from Google images, which I think they pinch from websites, without permission.

 

[sooo]

Learn something every day. Never realized I was tapping a site's bandwidth. I'm assuming sites like Youtube avail themselves to it, especially now that they're running so many paid advertisements during their vids, more exposure and they probably use that as a selling benefit to their advertisers. But what about Google Images, and all the other search engines' image offerings? Do they pay royalties of some kind? I read there are deep probing bots that search site's files, including hidden from view files, and they're trying to ban them. Could that be what Google images and the rest are using?

And it's outgoing bandwidth every time another site page is opened, wow.

http://altlab.com/hotlinking.html

 

[Liselle]

Okay, so we shouldn't 'hotlink' to other sites' images, nor should we upload them from our hard drives to here.

I'm more than happy to upload images from my computer to someplace like Flickr or OneDrive, and then link from there to here. But as Sooo said, does "don't hotlink" include sites like Google, and places like Flickr and MS OneDrive, which provide people with free storage because they have an account? I'd think surely that would be different from hotlinking to someone's personal website, aka another Clarity. It seems like that is what Flickr and OneDrive are for, and partly what they would have accepted as a cost of doing business when they gave storage space to account holders.

Here I uploaded another pretty kitten to my OneDrive, used OneDrive's "View Original" option, and pasted a URL ending in .jpg into the box in Clarity's Insert Images > From URL dialog. Let's see what happens!

 

[Liselle]

There he (or she) is, and the dear little thing has survived two page reloads!

So maybe that's the best thing to do? Upload files from our computers to places intended for storage (Microsoft OneDrive, in this case, or similar sites), generate a URL there, and then use the "From URL" option in Clarity's Insert Images function to display them here (with the "Retrieve remote file and reference locally" box unchecked, whatever that does).

Whatever will unburden Clarity the best. If Microsoft/Flickr/etc. cared about being burdened, they'd stop giving people free storage space (you'd think). That's a trade-off they've decided is worth it to them (you'd assume).

 

[Liselle]

I'm just looking at the duplicate post of mine Sooo mentioned (#36 and #37), and I think those have to be my own fault rather than the sort of glitch we've been talking about. I don't know what I may have done, but the two posts are ~30 minutes apart. When the glitchy double posts happen, they're timestamped one right after the other.

 

[Liselle]

Oh what on earth?!

Go to post #47 and click on Reply With Quote. See that gibberish between the image tags? This gibberish?

https://rkwpdg.bn1302.livefilestore.com/y2popT6azjHS_5xTJNrAE23naLZaXA2wSYp4_I1adv73KgnytT80HCKiiSnowomA_Qf8207xqAI_avlCqGauNymSLGzJc_w3qquGCdo8cTefco/28144-kitten-small.jpg

That is supposed to be a kitten! Kitty displayed nicely through at least two page reloads, and when I just now came back to look, she is gone!

Am now trying Flickr:

Photo page > click on download arrow > click on View All Sizes > pick a size > right click on photo > select Copy Image Location (is what it says in Firefox) > go to post edit box on Clarity > click on Insert Image toolbar icon > select From URL option > uncheck "Retrieve remote file and reference locally" box > click on OK

Now STAY THERE, little one

 

[hilary]

I can see a kitten. (Though it's probably unrealistic to expect those to stay where you put them.)

Pictures apart... I'd like to clear up the posting errors issue. Perhaps it was caused by the server glitch the other day - but not, obviously, if it's still going on. Is it?

(I'll put up an announcement to ask for anyone else who's run into this to mention it.)

 

[Liselle]

Ha ha, yes. Kittens flitting around and/or hiding from people - not a shock

I haven't had posting errors recently...if or when I get one again, I'll post about it here (or whatever you'll tell us to do in the announcement).

Thanks, Hilary.

(Edited: I will stop kvetching about pictures in this thread in order to keep it for posting errors as it was meant to be...)

 

[Liselle]

I was hoping to not have anything more to report here, but alas...

I've been actively posting in Shared Readings - and thus logged in - for over an hour and a half. I haven't left, not for one minute.

Just now when I clicked on some button at the bottom of a post box which basically means "proceed," I got the following screen:

I think the button I had clicked on was "Preview Post. I'm not completely sure, since I wasn't trying to remember, but it was one of the buttons on the Go Advanced page (when I used my browser's back arrow after logging back in, that's the page I got - and my post was recovered, hooray.)

 

[hilary]

I think that would be a completely different issue. I will check.

 

[Liselle]

No, it's not at all the same errors as before. I put it here just because it's something that went wrong when submitting a post, rather than starting a whole new thread (which is another option, of course).

The good news is that I posted in a Shared Readings thread today and got no errors at all, neither the strange log-out nor the previous kinds (those haven't happened since those few days in the middle of the month, so maybe they have been fixed or went away on their own. Maybe most of these things would go away on their own if given half a chance ...)

 

[hilary]

Maybe tech support works like dentists. You know - you put up with it, it gets worse, you make an appointment... it disappears as if by magic.

The logout thing is a bit of a mystery. The forum and the membership software both have a setting to log people out after a certain period of inactivity. I just checked those settings, and I have both set to 12 hours. So unless you had been thinking really carefully about your choice of words...

 

[Trojina]

I lost a mega long post because I was logged out. Now if I am writing a long post or spending an inordinate amount of time choosing words I make sure it is saved or copied. I don't trust this place not to just log me out at random like it did that day. I didn't know I had been logged out until I pressed the 'submit' button and saw what Lisa saw I think...cant recall. I know I was told I was logged out and I hadn't logged myself out.

But that happened a few months back, hasn't happened since though the psychological damage remains.

 

[Trojina]

It makes me wonder if the forum has an independent consciousness and when it thinks you are faffing about for too long it gets irritable and just boots you out.

 

[Liselle]

It's nice to know it's happened to someone else, and that it's not just me doing something weird...thanks, Hilary.

 

[hilary]

Next time you get logged out unexpectedly from the forum, please could you click across straight away to some other page of the site - the 'products and services' tab, say - and check what it says at the very top right? 'Log in' or 'Log out'?

The reason I ask: log in here is a somewhat complicated animal, managed overall by Amember (which knows which products/ memberships you've signed up for) but with Vbulletin running the forums, obviously. So if you find yourself logged out here, it'd be useful to know whether you're logged out of Amember, too.