The Discourse Images Guardian has been updated by @mbcahyono so it now works with the latest Discourse beta, I have deployed it to a couple of servers running v2.3.0.beta1 .
Today we began internally trialling a new “secure media” setting, which is only usable if S3 uploads are enabled. What this will do is the following:
For Discourse instances that have the “login required” setting enabled, all uploads are considered secure, but if the setting is not enabled, only private message uploads are considered secure.
All securely uploaded media URLs within posts and private messages will no longer directly point to the file, but will go through an endpoint to determine access to the media first based on site settings.
Secure media in emails are replaced by placeholder text prompting users to log in to the Discourse instance to view the media.
If an upload has been used in a secure context previously, we do not allow posting the same upload in a public topic.
This setting is currently only available for self-hosted Discourse instances. We will provide further updates once we have completed internal trials.
The downside is that you can not use a CDN anymore for private stuff and every image request / download has to “pipe” through the app to unlock the bucket for a user.
On small internal forums it is very unlikely you will notice anything. On a huge forums that require login, giving up the CDN and piping requests via the app may have some impact.