Image board as source

Occasionally on Danbooru I find images simply whose source is simply 'Image board.' I was wondering whether this is an official convention, or simply something people started doing. Either way I think this practice should stop. I propose requiring uploaders to upload from image URL [updated] and then change it directly to the post (if available ).

'Image board' conveys no useful information. To begin with there are a multitude of different image boards. It would be just like saying 'friend site' in lieu of a direct link to a tweet or Facebook post. Image boards come and go so it would be nice to at least know whether the image was sourced from a defunct one or if its associated post could still be found. Also some image boards may be archived by third parties and so a link would be useful in aiding with finding a cache or record.

There are also some useful updates that could be performed Although I do not suggest a bulk update, source:"Image board" could be seen as a type of source request and added to the things to do post for that purpose. Also a list of up to date chan archives could be kept for mass updates from certain boards. Image board archival sites can be just as ephemeral as the boards they track so it would be useful to have the preferred archive of the moment for archived content.

This is due to Danbooru itself. Sources from http://i.4cdn.org, http://urnc.yi.org, and http://yui.cynthia.bne.jp are automatically rewritten to "Image board". That's the cause, but there are probably people who picked up on it and change sources manually too.

Why do we do this? Not sure, but I think it dates back to the earliest days, when it was more common to get things from 4chan threads that died quickly and weren't archived. I agree it's a dumb thing to do though. I've submitted a patch to stop this mangling of sources (issue #2763).

@evazion said:

This is due to Danbooru itself. Sources from http://i.4cdn.org, http://urnc.yi.org, and http://yui.cynthia.bne.jp are automatically rewritten to "Image board". That's the cause, but there are probably people who picked up on it and change sources manually too.

Why do we do this? Not sure, but I think it dates back to the earliest days, when it was more common to get things from 4chan threads that died quickly and weren't archived. I agree it's a dumb thing to do though. I've submitted a patch to stop this mangling of sources (issue #2763).

Is it possible to reverse those automatic changes? I've always assumed that there is a more verbose version of edit histories but it would not surprise me if this is frequently flushed.

Unfortunately no, the source is overwritten during the upload process, before the post and post history even exists.

The only possible hope would be to take the webserver request logs and try to match up the original upload request with the corresponding post. But that would be a non-trivial job, and I doubt albert keeps the logs around for very long anyway.

Yeah, I was going to say that the original source may exist in the upload records, but even so, those all get expunged after about a day...