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Flickr Red X of Death

West Coast Birder

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Hey guys,

I am trying to debug the Red X problem that we see frequently with hotlinking Flickr images. Since I have a "Pro" account on Flickr, I'm trying to avail of the VIP customer service that comes with it. :laugh2:

I need some help. Can you send PM me the URLs of images that you have had issues with? The CS guy would like to see some examples to find out if there are any patterns of why this is happening.

@RobAmy my, @DavidWatts, @realairlight, @Lester Wareham, any others, please send me some info so that we can get to the bottom of this. If it is not on the Flickr end, then it has to be on the forum end and I would like to systematically debug this problem. Please also send me anything that improved matters - I know that sometimes, it fixes itself after a while and sometimes, you may have had to go to a smaller pixel size image to get it to work. I don't know if any of this is just random happenstance or whether there is a pattern.

Thanks, guys!
 
Interesting that one of them now seems to work when trying to post here

I did notice something like this before, I tried to post a picture came up with the Red x, backed out and came back in, posted again and the image loaded up correctly
 
Interesting that one of them now seems to work when trying to post here

I did notice something like this before, I tried to post a picture came up with the Red x, backed out and came back in, posted again and the image loaded up correctly

Thanks, Jay. I shared Jack's link with Flickr. I will do the same with yours. It does seem like it starts working after a while in most cases. That might be a clue as to what is going on.

Edit: I stepped away from my computer for 5 minutes and now, all of your images are displaying fine. I will communicate this to Flickr as well. We'll solve this one way or another! :D
 
Ok, that's a different red -X than.:wat::facepalm:(I do not use Flickr)
 
As of the time of this post, flickr images are displaying as posted for me.
 
Ok, that's a different red -X than.:wat::facepalm:(I do not use Flickr)
The forum displays a red X any time it is unable to fetch the image data and display it as the BBCode instructs it to. If the BBcode points to an image location and then your delete the image on Flickr, then you are going to get the X as well.
 
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Hey guys,

I am trying to debug the Red X problem that we see frequently with hotlinking Flickr images. Since I have a "Pro" account on Flickr, I'm trying to avail of the VIP customer service that comes with it. :laugh2:

I need some help. Can you send PM me the URLs of images that you have had issues with? The CS guy would like to see some examples to find out if there are any patterns of why this is happening.

@RobAmy my, @DavidWatts, @realairlight, @Lester Wareham, any others, please send me some info so that we can get to the bottom of this. If it is not on the Flickr end, then it has to be on the forum end and I would like to systematically debug this problem. Please also send me anything that improved matters - I know that sometimes, it fixes itself after a while and sometimes, you may have had to go to a smaller pixel size image to get it to work. I don't know if any of this is just random happenstance or whether there is a pattern.

Thanks, guys!
I think the display size chosen has to be 1600 pixels or less on the longest size, and less than 1MB
 
I just noticed another Red Flickr Death X. This reminds me of the SmugMug Red X problem one year ago. Related companies -- maybe a related problem?
 
I just noticed another Red Flickr Death X. This reminds me of the SmugMug Red X problem one year ago. Related companies -- maybe a related problem?
I'm beginning to suspect that's the case. I have an open ticket with Flickr to figure this out. Let's see what they say. In the few instances that it has happened recently, it has cleared itself within a few minutes on its own. So, it is clearly an inability by the forum software to get the information it needs within some timeout period. After a while, whatever bottleneck that was before clears up and the photo displays. Presumably, once the image is on the FoP side, it is cached (I need to check the admin section to see how long BBcode images are cached), so there are no further issues. If Flickr says there is no issue on their end (which I suspect they will), I will escalate to Xenforo to see what the issue is there. Since people worldwide are having the issue, it is likely not a problem with some local network congestion.
 
The SM images also cleared up after a few minutes and up to, sometimes, one full day. Most all the SM Red X's did eventually display, so there is a fetch request that times out. Presumedly, the fetches repeat until there is a success. I also remember that without doing anything on our part, the SM X issue just went away after a couple weeks and has not reoccured since. I don't think we ever knew exactly what was causing it.
 
Yeah, the intermittent behavior is aggravating. I’ll stay on top of this to see if we can figure it out. There are only two parties involved lol… and we know the data pipe between them is just fine.
 
Yeah, the intermittent behavior is aggravating. I’ll stay on top of this to see if we can figure it out. There are only two parties involved lol… and we know the data pipe between them is just fine.
Maybe the data pipe is intermittently bad?

The forum displays a red X any time it is unable to fetch the image data and display it as the BBCode instructs it to. If the BBcode points to an image location and then your delete the image on Flickr, then you are going to get the X as well.
I'm assuming the FoP software fetches the image data anytime that someone views a page containing an image according to the BBcode. FoP probably doesn't store the image locally otherwise this couldn't happen:
Patrick, I think those are because Sid must have deleted the photos. The links are broken and when I click on them, they only take me to his Flickr home page and not to the specific photos in question.
If the images were saved locally, you wouldn't notice if the link was there or not since the photo would be displayed!
 
yesterday I shared an image uploaded to flickr but even I left the post until today and the red X of death is still appearing. The funny thing is if you edit your post you can see the image in the preview but comes back to red X when saved it again. It's a weird issue as I tought it was something related to my browser.
 
If the images were saved locally, you wouldn't notice if the link was there or not since the photo would be displayed!
I had planned to convert all embeds to attachments, breaking the links so images would be stored on the FoP server and no matter what would happen on the photo hosting site (be it flickr or Smugmug or whatever), it wouldn't affect the images here. A smart, protective measure (remember the devastation with Photobucket?).

I was waiting for the software upgrade in January. But maybe it's a good idea to install the add-on now. I tested it earlier and it works just fine.

I talked about it here on the board back in August in this thread (from post #10).
 
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