Remote PNGs intermittently showing URLs instead of rendering

Contribute Bug

AI-generated summary

Users are experiencing an intermittent issue where remote PNG images hosted on their self-hosted MediaWiki server are not rendered in Discourse posts, instead displaying as URLs. This occurs unpredictably, with images sometimes showing and other times showing the link, even after posting. The issue is observed on the project’s hosted forum, discourse.gramps-project.org, which redirects to gramps.discourse.group. One user notes that a post with two such images received a “Popular Link” badge, indicating the links were shown instead of images, despite high view counts. A related discussion was posted in the Feedback category. One theory is that temporary blocking of the gramps-project.org server by Discourse’s systems may cause the issue, possibly due to load balancing or DNS configuration. Another user suggests the problem might stem from the server blocking access during image downloads. However, the cause remains unclear, and no mitigation strategy has been identified yet.

1

Without apparent pattern, remote PNG images are not rendered in forum discussions. Instead the URL (not a preview) is shown instead.

It happens frequently enough that one of my postings (that has 2 remote images and no other links) was awarded a “Popular Link” badge today. One image had 46 clicks and the other had 50 clicks but the thread has 1.7k views. So it showed the images instead of the links for most of the time.

We have a large number of GUI elements and dialog captures for our (self-hosted MediaWiki) documentation. Rather than have redundant uploads clogging up the Discourse host, we want to just link to the remote location for that image on our MediaWiki server.

Most of the time, this works fine. (Although it is frustrating that the Scaling interface isn’t available in the Discourse editor GUI.) However, Discourse unpredictably shows the URL. When I “quoted” the message, the preview showed the URLs and still did so after hitting the “Create Topic” button. However, repeated views sometimes show the image, sometimes the URL.

Our open source project’s discourse forum is hosted courtesy of the Discourse Org.
discourse.gramps-project.org redirects to gramps.discourse.group

A message about this problem (linked to an example of an offending message) was posted to our Feedback category.

2

Is it possible that this is an artifact of load balancing with some server mirrors or DNS servers configured differently?

3

This can happen for files such as:


https://gramps-project.org/wiki/images/2/20/Stock_add.png

If we can not access the file when we are trying to download it cause gramps-project.org blocked us temporarily.

3 Likes
4

Do you have any suggestions for making our server never block you? Or at least give you higher priority?

5

to be honest, I am not sure at all, no idea how it is configured and what mitigations your servers have in place.

1 Like
6

I understand. Was simply hoping you had heard of it before and someone had had a experimented enough to give us a jumpstart.

We’ll check back if we find a way to mitigate the issue.

Thanks!

1 Like