The discussion revolves around integrating ImgBB’s image hosting service into Discourse to save disk space. nekodroid highlights that ImgBB’s current implementation lacks a toolbar icon and embeds images as small links, differing from Discourse’s native upload behavior. Suggestions include building a plugin or theme component to handle uploads properly itsbhanusharma, though riking notes Discourse downloads remote images by default — requiring ImgBB to be added to disabled image download domains if used. itsbhanusharma later clarifies their idea was to mirror S3-style embedding, but admits it’s overkill. Alternatives like Backblaze B2 (free 10GB) are proposed pfaffman, though noted to have limited free outbound transfer (1GB/day) itsbhanusharma. nekodroid affirms their original intent and offers a small budget (~$10) for development. wendellverli expresses interest in such a plugin, but pfaffman estimates development costs at $500–$1000 — far exceeding the cost of using affordable S3-compatible storage like DigitalOcean Spaces over time. No such plugin exists yet, and using existing object storage is deemed more cost-effective.
A theme component should suffice for the upload component, but by default Discourse will download remote images to ensure they aren’t deleted.
Make sure to add imgbb to disabled image download domains after checking their policy about when images are deleted if you implement this upload widget.
I’d guess that such a plugin will cost $500-1000 to develop, which is pretty many years of Digital Ocean Spaces (or any of the serveral others in Configure an S3 compatible object storage provider for uploads). In fact, it would probably be cheaper to use Spaces than to pay to maintain the described plugin if it existed.
