Guys from my forum likes to post big gifs in “fun pictures” topic. It pisses me off because they weight a lot and page loads forever. I think it’s a good idea to show gifs as a previews and when you click on some picture - ajax it. I’ve seen this feature on vk.com and I rly liked this idea.
In the interim, it might be a good idea to have the lightboxer hide images based on file size as well as dimensions. Especially if they’re animated GIFs.
For some reason, Chrome reacts very, very badly to images like these and becomes almost unusable until the image has finished loading. (This isn’t specific to Discourse, however.)
Its odd, sometimes this gif totally messes up chrome on windows and sometimes it does nothing, really feels like a chrome bug to me.
My preferred solution here is simple to render a blank div where there are images as soon as an image is not in the browsers view. We already pull posts out and replace with blank divs when you load too much, but this would take it to the next level
I thought at one point animated gifs were click to play above a specific size?
I remember when an capturing animated of a bug for meta I had to make sure it was below a specific size I think it was something like <460 x <500 to ensure it would play automatically.
Pretty sure @zogstrip has commented on this before.
This means make users reposting all the time. Sinse there’s no automatic service for this yet that Discourse could use, maybe you guys can add a spoiler shortcode that loads content only when you open it? Then admins could just add a forum rule “post big gifs only in spoilers”. We need spoiler code anyway for topics with movies discrussions.
It’s interesting that different browsers handle this fine…
Use case is: 31 megabyte animated gif, served from slow host. Same URL as in first post. Results?
Google Chrome: cripples browser perf during load, intermittently shows animation frames. Performance is at a crawl, to do anything in the browser is painfully slow.
Firefox: browser seems OK during load, shows animation frames at a decent clip as it loads. Performance seems OK, you can do anything while the image is loading.
IE: browser seems OK during load, shows animations at a rapid clip as it loads. Performance seems OK, you can do anything while the image is loading.
So this does seem to be a bit of a Chrome specific problem.
Well, it doesn’t embeds so I don’t see much profit from this.
It would be nice to have a checkbox somewhere in admin panel that would make all gifs to show as links. This would solve this problem, not pretty way, but solid way for sure.
It would be nice if this was done automatically. Maybe the video plays when the poster reaches the post too.
EDIT: In fact, gfycat has an api to convert GIFs to MP4. Might not be such a bad option to have this happen automatically. I bet a plugin could be made for this.
Hey, I just realized that gfycat have API and it’s possible to send all gifs from post to their service and change them into video-links automatically. https://gfycat.com/api @sam@eviltrout@codinghorror Can you take a look?
The first line of that document tells me their platform is not ready to be used that way:
While Gfycat does not yet have a full fledged API with access credentials and advanced access control, the core features are exposed through easy to use JSON endpoints.
IMVHO on-the-fly conversion that requires interaction with third party service (gfycat) should be an external plugin or a custom JS.
But I think that default Discourse install could easily ship with automatic onebox for already existing Gfycat links, just like it already does for GIFV from Imgur.
