Images

Hello everyone,

I am very happy to be able to pick up my quill again today, as I have been working tirelessly for almost a month on something that was fairly difficult to set up: rewriting from scratch the way images are hosted on the site.

Here are the main changes:

1/ You can now upload your images directly to the site, and no longer need to go through other platforms. You can also add alt text, which I strongly encourage for visually impaired users. It is now discouraged to use other sites to upload your images, as they would then be compressed twice, which would reduce their quality.

This was not a simple thing to set up, as it involves many security mechanisms to prevent malicious files from being uploaded.

2/ You can now resize your images directly with [img=100x100]. The first dimension indicates the width and, by default, the system will use the corresponding height to make sure that the width / height ratio is respected.

3/ Two new BBCode options are now available to place an image within the text, floating either to the left or to the right. This means you no longer need to use tables to place an image to the left or right of your paragraphs while trying to guess the length of the text. I very warmly recommend using this new option: it is simpler, more accessible, and will work much better on phones than a column created with a table.

The codes are: [img float=left] and [img float=right]. They can, of course, be combined with image resizing if needed.

4/ Images have been compressed into new formats: AVIF and WebP.

These formats make it possible, with equivalent quality, to obtain a much smaller file size. Image weight has now been reduced by 65% on average, and by up to 95% on some images, which means pages load much faster, especially for users with weaker internet connections. I have also used new systems to prioritize the most important images in order to make pages even lighter.

The site now contains a total of 1,249,565 different images, weighing 112.5 GB across their different versions. This work, in addition to the many rounds of trial and error, required more than 160 hours, or 7 days and nights, of image encoding. A small thought for my legs, heated to 60 degrees Celsius (140 Farenheit) by my poor laptop, obviously right in the middle of a historical heatwave.

I had not planned to tackle this so soon, but I was forced to do so because one of our image hosts caused problems. This led to all kinds of difficulties, display bugs, and affected some of the BBCodes you use. I am truly sorry about that, and please be assured that I did my best to balance everything.

5/ For administrators, it is now possible to choose and delete unused background or object images.

The rewrite is continuing. For now, it is rather frustrating: most of it is invisible to you, except when I break something.

But the foundations are gradually being laid for new features that I hope you will like

I will soon start working on visible things, which I hope to be able to show you sometime in July.

Thank you for your patience and your tolerance of bugs!

Zachary