PSA: Imgur will begin removing inactive, anonymous image uploads tomorrow. Archive what you can!

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

Our new Terms of Service will go into effect on May 15, 2023. We will be focused on removing old, unused, and inactive content that is not tied to a user account from our platform as well as nudity, pornography, & sexually explicit content. You will need to download/save any images that you wish to save if they no longer adhere to these Terms.

Our goal is that the removal of inactive content will be imperceivable, because ultimately, our intent is to limit the disruption to Imgurians' experience. We plan to use a combination of total views and recent views, among other criteria, to define content as inactive. We also plan on running some smaller scale, reversible tests to ensure we are only removing content that will not have an impact on Imgurians' experience.

I'm not sure exactly what qualifies as "old, unused, and inactive" under the new TOS, but that would be an apt description for this site, so I guess a significant chunk of ilx history is going to vanish like it did when Tinypic and Photobucket took similar steps. Archive your old WDYLLs or album covers drawn from memory or Andrey Arshavin photoshops or whatever you think is worth saving

omg thank you unregistered!!!

yw!

i think i will let the rest of my drunkenly animate fall apart

it is the way of the internet

hmm, this does make it a bit ambiguous though

We plan to use a combination of total views and recent views, among other criteria, to define content as inactive.

i wonder, if you link to an imgur image on ilx, if viewing an ilx thread with the image adds to the "views" on imgur. maybe it does if the image is opened in a new tab?

i should know this kind of thing, but i don't. anyone else have thoughts?

https://i.imgur.com/5LpmYrd.gif

i wonder, if you link to an imgur image on ilx, if viewing an ilx thread with the image adds to the "views" on imgur. maybe it does if the image is opened in a new tab?

i should know this kind of thing, but i don't. anyone else have thoughts?

I logged into my imgur account and checked the view counts for some private photos of Uncle Kracker that I posted on ilx, and they have a few hundred views. I doubt hundreds of people opened images of Uncle Kracker in a new tab, so a visit to a thread containing an imgur image should contribute to its view count. but I have no idea what criteria imgur is using to determine if a photo is "unused and inactive"

I guess I kinda idiotically trusted imgur not to execute a tinypic style purge because...idk, it was created by a redditor? it had its own community with sad little meet and greets and in-group memes (mostly just the Travolta and Javert gifs)? but wikipedia says it was acquired by "MediaLab AI, Inc., a holding company of internet brands", so now it's just another cold, unfeeling file hosting service. I wish the internet archive (or some other org with a real interest in preserving internet history) would launch a widely used image host so this kind of thing wouldn't keep happening every 5 or 10 years. but nobody really cares if bodybuilding forum threads from 2008 are still readable in the present day, so I'm not holding out hope