RandomImagur2

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just in the last few days (maybe a week?) the site wallopics wont load up any pictures. i know its been around a while and chances are you havent checked on it recently but i've certainly enjoyed the site during my brainnumb phases.

cheers!

I'm having the same issue. All requests are being 403'ed by imgur. If one could remove the "referrer" from the request it probably would work but I don't know if that crosses moral lines.

Someone please fix this. I love this thing so much. Help.

Ack! I should have left notifications for this repo on! I just noticed this evening that imgur has started blocking wallopics. I reached out to them for an explanation- we'll see what they say.

As @voussoir pointed it, they are directly blocking wallopics.com as a referrer:

$ curl --referer 'wallopics.com' -I http://i.imgur.com/1lhTi.jpg
HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden

$ curl --referer 'notwallopics.com' -I http://i.imgur.com/1lhTi.jpg
HTTP/1.1 200 OK

I could probably work around this issue by moving to another domain- one they're unlikely to block. For example, I could have wallopics.com redirect to s3.amazonaws.com/wallopics_bucket/ or something. However, if Imgur's dead-set against this site existing, I don't know that I really want to go against their wishes.

Well, it's pretty clear that imgur doesn't appreciate the bandwidth sink, so any other domain you start will get blocked once they notice it.

Can you upload a .zip with everything precompiled so we don't have to install Grunt? Then we could at least play with the site on our own.

I could, but that's pretty much exactly what's at http://wallopics.com/. Just "view source" and download each of the files from there! :)

If I get a chance, though, I'll put the compiled files in the github repo as well. I don't actually have grunt set up myself anymore, so I'll have to do that this weekend or something.

Bah. Looks like it's not going to get fixed. I asked imgur what was up, and got this response:

Thanks for writing. Unfortunately your site has been blocked from hotlinking because it violates our user's privacy. We offer private image uploading and want our users to feel secure knowing that no one can find an image without the direct link. I'm very sorry for the confusion. Please let me know if I can help further.

I replied saying basically "Thanks for the explanation. I won't try to circumvent this block, but here are a few reasons why it's a silly policy and I could circumvent it."

Their response to that was:

Thanks for the info! We've just recently started cracking down on referrers, so we'll definitely take that into consideration. But we make a distinction between private and secret images. An image can never be secret, but any privately uploaded image can only be accessed by going to the direct link - even if you guess it! Here's an article that explains this further: https://help.imgur.com/hc/en-us/articles/201746817-Image-and-album-privacy-explained-. Have a great weekend!

Anyway, I'll probably update wallopics.com with a message explaining what happened and a link to this repo. Wallopics.com will not be coming back up.

Ah well, thanks none the less!

If anyone wants to just use a copy of this site themselves, they can just download the index.html file I just added. It's just the whole site concatenated into a single html file. If you download that and open it in a web browser, the site should work fine for you.

Added more of a writeup on the situation to my blog; the site now redirects to that post.

http://kevinkuchta.com/_site/2015/05/wallopics-is-dead/