How do we repair Gonzalo Medina's posts containing images?

Question

As I explained in this answer, all the links to images that were not uploaded via the "add image" button are broken. (EDIT: See also this announcement by Jeff for the background.) This has the consequence that lots of the posts of Gonzalo Medina show this

instead of the intended image. At the moment I see two possible ways to fix this, one even worse than the other:

1. Manually remove stack. from all the image links in Gonzalo's posts. This would bump all the posts; moreover, it wouldn't move the images to the stack account, so they would be lost sooner or later.

2. Manually remove stack. from the image links and re-upload all the images via the "add image" button. This would also bump all the posts, and it would be even more work.

So what can be done about it?

Answer 1

I've gone through the list Caramdir provided and couldn't find any more broken images. I've been reuploading the images in batches of five for the past month or so (= solution 2 of the OP), and it looks like they're all fixed now. Dave Jarvis doesn't have as many posts and just a few still needed fixing. So unless there are more users who have been sneaking around the official uploading-interface, this issue can be regarded solved.

Answer 2

Hmm. I could easily replace the URLs on all his posts, but that sweeps one very important issue under the rug:

Unless you purchase a $24.95/yr imgur pro account plan, images you upload to imgur may be lost forever any time after 6 months.

That is, we NEED images to uploaded through the built-in image button here, because those images are guaranteed to stay around forever per our contract with imgur.

These images need to be re-uploaded under our network account, and I don't have a magic tool which does that.

Answer 3

One way to avoid the edit bumps would be the following, though it would need some action by Jeff (or another overlord). Gonzalo could upload all of the images to imgur in one go by posting a "question" here on meta which included all of the images added via the correct method. Then armed with a list of the old urls and the new ones, Jeff could replace all instances of the old ones with the new ones reasonably simply. That would get it all done in one go and would mean that no answers were bumped to the front page.

Answer 4

I was thinking on a possible solution for this issue. But since we are part of the StackOverflow framework, this idea would certainly affect the whole structure.

Considering this announcement about getting rid of salutations, we could come up with a similar RegEx pattern to automatically fix the image links. At least, here in TeX.SE. Not sure it can be done locally, though. The benefits i see from this approach:

• We don't need to do anything. Posts are fixed by themselves.
• Every single image that matches the pattern will be automatically fixed, not only Gonzalo's.
• We can prevent old, current an future image issues by simply adapting the pattern rules.

Anyway, those were my 2 cents. =)

EDIT1: As Jeff pointed in his answer, even if the image links are replaced by the correct form (from i.stack. to i.), the problem still remains as the images will silently and gradually disappear from imgur. The add button feature is linked to a SE contract with the imagehost, which garantees that the images will be preserved from an eventual spring cleaning.