We have a hosted instance of Discourse and are including images from our own website. This worked fine until today, when the user “system” started to replace the URLs with links to downloaded versions. I tried turning this off globally but to no avail. Also tried to configure our domain as an exception but this also did not work.
I understand the reasoning behind the feature but it seems that neither the global setting nor the exception work at the moment. Has anyone else had the same problem? Is there anything I may have misunderstood about how this works?
On my forum (also hosted by Discourse, updated about 2 hours ago) the disabled image download domains site setting still works as expected. Other images are downloaded, but those configured there are not.
I wonder what changed on your forum that results in this process starting today. Are there setting changes in your staff action logs?
Maybe it also helps to share how you configured the setting, though the download remote images to local checkbox is quite simple.
I tested this exact configuration locally and it worked, that is, the image from zensical.org does not get downloaded. I suspect what happened in your instance is that the image with the same URL was already downloaded locally before the site setting change, and the app matches the upload based on its sha1 hash.
One way to test is to try with a different image under the same domain?
Thanks, I have created a test post and will wait a bit to see if system comes and edits it.
In the meantime, is there a way to purge those images so they do not get inserted again? I asked Claude and it said I could remove the image links and a background job would tidy up after a grace period. Sounds less than ideal but assuming this is the only time I have to do this then ok - but wanted to ask if there is another option?
I think I’ll duplicate the images on our website, then edit the link so that the live document stays intact. Later on, when everything’s settled, I can remove the original images.
