TCF Reusing old image urls?

darthmorf

Treederator
Staff member
Moderator
So, I was going through the old CC ports from TO thread (https://forums.terraria.org/index.php?threads/creation-compendiums-1-18-ported-over.1621/), and I encountered what I believe to be a strange bug.

What appears to be happening is that old images are being replaced by more recent ones. Two examples I've found being:
unknown.png
upload_2017-6-2_22-42-14.png


The first is from Creation Compendium #8, the second #7. The yoyo one is clearly a screenshot of the 'Sick Throw - obtain the Terrarian' steam achievement, which was not a thing when the original CC was posted, nor when I ported it over from TO. The second seems to be of a thread on TCF which again did not exist at the time the CC was posted. Neither seem like the sort of thing that would be entered into the CC either. Strange huh?
There are probably more that I haven't got to further down in the thread.

I know that these are some of the earliest images uploaded to TCF, as the thread they are part of was posted on September 29th 2014 - just after TCF launched.

I have three theories as to what the cause is:

  1. TCF has somehow (accidentally or on purpose) started to reuse space previously housing older images as space for newer ones.
  2. The image's urls pointed to Terraria Online (which now redirects here) and somehow pointed to images already posted here. (I think this is the most likely)
  3. We're being trolled by time travellers.
Anyone else got any thoughts?
 
Because Kane. :p

Any links from TO are no longer valid. That's been known for quite some time.

Unless the old images were recovered and re-hosted (on TCF or elsewhere) well before TO closed, they are likely gone. Even before the closure of TO was announced, there was some "event" initiated by Curse that moved all the posts to a "new" server but that neglected to move any of the attached images. Re-Logic/TCF had nothing to do with that. The remnants of the moderation staff there (me) were not informed of this before it happened. One day the images were there; the next day, they were gone without explanation or apology.

You might be able to recover something from The Wayback Machine. Beyond that, there's nothing much we can do about that.
 
The short explanation of why different images show up is in how Xenforo works.

Each attachment is assigned a one-up number, which you see as part of the URL. TCF has attachments that match the same one-up number. Since 'terrariaonline.com' now redirects to 'forums.terraria.org', XF just uses the same attachment numbers and substitutes the corresponding image by number.
 
I hope this never gets fixed, it can be very amusing.:p
There's no fixing it, at least from what I can gather. The old TO image references are just gone.

I think @Eli10293 once discovered one of his TCF-posted sprites in the signature of a defunct user account, which actually was intended to be a mod support banner.

It's not so amusing if some of the old CC entries that were thought to be archived turn out to be lost. I gather that is what darthmorf was looking for.

eta: for example, https://web.archive.org/web/2012022...s/creation-compendium-medieval-castles.79944/

The images here are just gone. A move from one internal server to another by Curse personnel was apparently not done correctly, so much of the image attachments forum-wide were lost. By the time this was noticed, it was too late to do anything about it (or so we were told by people who had no interest in helping us).
 
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So, I was going through the old CC ports from TO thread (https://forums.terraria.org/index.php?threads/creation-compendiums-1-18-ported-over.1621/), and I encountered what I believe to be a strange bug.

What appears to be happening is that old images are being replaced by more recent ones. Two examples I've found being:
unknown.png
View attachment 172026

The first is from Creation Compendium #8, the second #7. The yoyo one is clearly a screenshot of the 'Sick Throw - obtain the Terrarian' steam achievement, which was not a thing when the original CC was posted, nor when I ported it over from TO. The second seems to be of a thread on TCF which again did not exist at the time the CC was posted. Neither seem like the sort of thing that would be entered into the CC either. Strange huh?
There are probably more that I haven't got to further down in the thread.

I know that these are some of the earliest images uploaded to TCF, as the thread they are part of was posted on September 29th 2014 - just after TCF launched.

I have three theories as to what the cause is:

  1. TCF has somehow (accidentally or on purpose) started to reuse space previously housing older images as space for newer ones.
  2. The image's urls pointed to Terraria Online (which now redirects here) and somehow pointed to images already posted here. (I think this is the most likely)
  3. We're being trolled by time travellers.
Anyone else got any thoughts?
Loads of instances of when this occurs can be found on old random suggestions such as https://forums.terraria.org/index.php?threads/post-mech-hell-expansion.830/
 
Alright, it seems my second theory was somewhat correct. I must say, this confused me greatly when I first stumbled upon it!
Most of the CC entries are hosted on sites like imgur so are still working, so it doesn't matter too much. I was attempting to use waybackmachine last night but the servers seemed to be under a lot of strain and were taking a while to load.
Thanks for the response.
 
Yeah, I've encountered this before when I was browsing through my old posts on my art thread...Also the same weird shenanigans happened.

As example, the image in the spoiler below appears to be my old thumbnail link to my art thread:
And this still appears on @Devinox signature...<.<

ppower-artwork-png.115668

I think that's pretty much the only one I've encountered at the moment, but it's good to know that this has been addressed before.
 
if this is done it should only be done from this time onwards since it will needlessly break existing posts with good images.
It's only an issue with old image posts from the Terraria Online era - recent threads shouldn't have to worry about it.
 
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