Hi everyone, sorry for the delay in responding. Dan Cornett pointed out that we already fixed wikitext links to photos.geni.com images, but Job Waterreus and Dimitri Gazan pointed out that wikitext image links to the new media.geni.com URLs stop working after a day or so. We've released a fix for that, meaning that if you grab an image URL to a photo at media.geni.com with the expiring hash parameter and paste that URL into the wikitext double-curly braces, those photos will continue to be viewable when the wikitext is rendered even many days after the URL was captured. By means of example, below is an embedded image (my profile photo thumbnail) with an expiry of September 24th ( media.geni.com/p13/9e/27/1a/e7/5344484956e968d7/juq92yif_t2.jpg?hash=3631b92e228cb181a6c68b788b73978a0a539e08259043220e10b3141ef2dcc4.1664002799 ) but when my message is rendered, the expiration will be updated so that it it still viewable today:
Torbjørn Igelkjøn the S3 links should have been fixed a week ago -- if you can find an example that's not working, please let me know so we can investigate.
Craig Andrew Miles No, I'm not necessarily saying the current state of affairs is acceptable; I need to understand exactly what's wrong (preferably with an example I can look at) so that I can determine if it's a) a bug, b) an unintended consequence of the change that we should fix, or c) something we will no longer support. For the media link to your profile photo, what is fixed as of today is that you can embed it as a wikitext image (using double curly braces) on our site and it will continue to work. Bare links to that URL are no longer supported outside of Geni for privacy concerns that you may not have, but for which we've become convinced are absolutely necessary due to things like the use of the Wayback Machine to cull URLs of photos that have long since been made private but continued to function. This means Geni can no longer be used as a general-purpose image sharing service (something we never intended in the first place, and which is a risky proposition given the kinds of images that shady individuals may seek to host somewhere semi-anonymous and then share to the Internet at large or within other non-Geni communities). Rather, photos are now shared as the site determines who is able to view them, and for a limited period of time to limit sharing.
Livio Scremin and Torbjørn Igelkjøn whether or not a photo is publicly-viewable is a function of whether or not it's tagged to something public like a profile or a project. We certainly don't want to break legitimate use cases on Geni, so I'm asking you to give me specific use cases and we'll see if we can address those. I already see one other case we should consider, which is the bare URL that Craig Andrew Miles posted above (NOT within double-curly braces); I believe we could rewrite those "on the fly" to refresh the expiration the same way we do with embedded images. Before I commit to that, though, I want to consider the privacy impact (for example, I upload a photo that's private but suppose my 3rd cousin can see it because they're within my Family Group radius; they copy the image URL and send it to a complete stranger on Geni without my permission. Do I really want the complete stranger to be able to view it for all of eternity?? Or is that unavoidable anyway, because the third cousin could just save the image as a file and share their own personal copy of it?)