Let's fix our now-broken images

Question

Stack Exchange is in the process of switching to HTTPS on all sites. As part of this, they have already fixed links to images hosted on imgur (which is where images go if you upload them in a post). At the same time, they stopped showing images that are to other sites and use HTTP in the URLs.

I wasn't clever enough to notice the implications of that before this week's SEDE update, when it would still have been easy to grab a list of affected posts. Now the query is more complicated, but fellow moderator jefromi has created a query that we think finds most of them. This query found 83 images on our main site.

Let's try to fix those posts. Some image links might have rotted since posting (i.e. those images were missing last week too); others exist just fine but at HTTP URLs. The task is to:

Find the image -- if the original URL works, great; if not, try the Wayback Machine.
If the site serving the image works with HTTPS, fix the URL in the post.
If not, decide (a) whether the image is valuable and (b) if so, whether it seems kosher to upload a copy to imgur. (If in doubt about use of other people's intellectual property, don't.) Make appropriate changes to the post.
While you're in there anyway, see if the image's alt text is currently the generic "enter image description here" and, if so, fix that. Alt text is used by people who can't see images, like those using screen readers; the best text is a short, meaningful description of what's shown in the image. If you see anything else you can easily improve (spelling, formatting, etc), please do that too.

I'll post the list of affected posts (according to that query) in an answer. Please move them to the "done" section if you fix them.

Please don't do these all at once. We don't want to flood the front page and push recent posts out of view, but doing ten or so of these at a time shouldn't be too disruptive.

There is also a network-wide crowdcrafting project for broken image links, not specific to this site, but if anybody's feeling generous. — Jason C, Mar 13, 2017 at 4:49
"enter image description here" yea, that bugs me too. Blame the toolbar: most people don’t even notice what markup they’re inserting. The UI should primpt for this, IMO. — JDługosz, Mar 13, 2017 at 5:12
What do we do when people take exception to us editing posts and assume we're trying to wreck them (as per here)? — user10945, Mar 13, 2017 at 12:14
@Pete very valid question - my finger is itching to rollback to your edit as that is a better version of the answer, but I am afraid that it might cause an edit war with the person writing the answer. — Mrkvička, Mar 13, 2017 at 12:35
I guess it's up to them whether they want broken links in their answers or not. — user10945, Mar 13, 2017 at 12:51
@Pete thanks for your help, and for responding to his comment. I hope he responds to your comment by fixing it himself; perhaps he didn't look closely at the diff and misunderstood? — Monica Cellio, Mar 13, 2017 at 12:55
A) Wayback Machine is your friend in all this. B) If you've never donated to Wayback Machine to keep it open, now is a great time as it is helping the WB site you love fix broken images. — SRM, Mar 14, 2017 at 13:01
C) If you don't upload images to Imgur, you can at least pass a copy of the image as referenced after the change to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine for future reference. https://web.archive.org/save/<some full url>, for example https://web.archive.org/save/https://www.example.com/images/dummy.jpg To see if an archived copy exists, start at https://web.archive.org/web/*/<some full url> — user, Mar 16, 2017 at 13:07
@JDługosz ""enter image description here" yea, that bugs me too. Blame the toolbar:" - blame it does nothing for those who able to see the image. Would it be a tip when hover mouse, of name of image when one saves it, or a small line of text below image or something it would be used more. — MolbOrg, Apr 16, 2017 at 10:01
so many comments in that announce, the question is - does https stuff mean it will break all shared links which were posted elsewhere to WB? Or will they make redirects. — MolbOrg, Apr 16, 2017 at 10:16

20 revs, 6 users 39% · Accepted Answer · 2020-06-16 11:02:45Z

CLAIM A CHUNK TO WORK ON! Some chunks are shorter than others deliberately so people who just want a few can take those.

Not done

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I broke the list into chunks so more people can claim a chunk and work in parallel. I'm done for tonight (I hit the ~10 that Monica mentioned). — SRM, Mar 13, 2017 at 2:53
I'm wondering why some of those show as post titles, while most show as raw urls. I've had trouble getting them to show in posts automatically, in general. — JDługosz, Mar 13, 2017 at 5:15
@JDługosz I think the ones showing as titles are questions (despite the /a/### format) and the ones showing as raw URLs are answers . The query itself returns raw post numbers, so I had to do some URL-munging to turn them into links, and while looking for a general /post/### form unsuccessfully, I discovered that /a works for questions too. — Monica Cellio, Mar 13, 2017 at 12:51
Stackbot appears to be fixing images from more hosts, so this is getting a bit quicker now. I'll still only do a batch a day when I can spare the time to prevent screen-fulls of old questions getting bumped. — user10945, Mar 16, 2017 at 8:17

2 revs · Accepted Answer · 2017-04-13 12:52:34Z

2

But don’t break things!

@SRM your https link replacement on Unlimited Stellar Fusion Thought Experiment was over-eager: you replaced the image with an imager copy, but also replaced the link to the hyperphysics source document with the same new url (to the image only)! The note the difference between [1] [1] syntax (used by the toolbar and often not changed) and [1] [2] where the href is different from the img src url.

edited Apr 13, 2017 at 12:52

community wiki

2 revs
JDługosz

$\begingroup$ Thanks for checking. That was one of the hardest ones... the image replacer wouldn't work for some reason ... I had to copy it out manually, and I botched it. $\endgroup$
– SRM
Mar 14, 2017 at 4:49
1

$\begingroup$ image replacer? A tool like the toolbar probably assumes a simple case. IMO the toolbar image insert is dumb in several ways: besides “enter image description here” being inserted, it puts a href and the img sec to the same target. If that's the case, the outer wrapper is pointless, as browsers can generally open an image on its own page with a menu item. It should prompt for the title text, and take an optional link which if not given is not put in. $\endgroup$
– JDługosz
Mar 14, 2017 at 4:55

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