new feature: enable / disable direct linking

[emily]

You can now enable / disable direct linking at the account level and the gallery level.

You can edit your direct linking setting for your whole account on your account page.
Then, on the advanced view of the edit gallery page, you can choose to accept or override the account default setting just for that particular gallery.
To get to the advanced view, just edit the gallery and click the 'advanced' link near the top of the page.

So, if you only have one gallery of images for which you want direct linking enabled, you can disable direct linking on your account and then enable it for that particular gallery.

Enjoy!
-Emily

[castledude]

First a big thanks for all those of us that were tired of answering the most asked question in Q&A.

Second. I'll repost this from the help section (to maybe keep a few other questions from being generated).

If you disable direct linking, images that have already been linked to will still show up for a little while before they are updated. All other images are blocked from direct linking immediately.

[matiasasun]

Thanks Emily. Great feature.

[sheila]

Thanks, Emily but even if I untick to disable direct linking at account settings, update it and then close down, when I come back in again, the tick is back in the box allowing direct linking. I had Slug disable direct linking a long while ago so I don't know if this has anything to do with it.

Cheers
Sheila

[sheila]

Thanks, Emily but even if I untick to disable direct linking at account settings, update it and then close down, when I come back in again, the tick is back in the box allowing direct linking. I had Slug disable direct linking a long while ago so I don't know if this has anything to do with it.

Cheers
Sheila

Jumped the gun, Emily. Left it for an hour and went back into site and direct linking box has no tick and direct linking now disable.

Thanks for this.
Cheers
Sheila

[eclecticphoto]

Thank you!!!!!!!!!!!

[arjunrc]

Hello Emily,
Great stuff !
Unfortunately, there may still be a usability issue. A lot of us would like to direct link ourselves when we post - for example, to sites like dpreview.com but do not want other sites to direct link. As of now, its either all or none. Do you think you can add an 'exclude/include' list option in the advanced section that lets me disable all direct links except for sites with specified domain names ?

regds
arjun

[emily]

We thought about adding an option to specify some direct linking sites that are ok. However, implementing this means relying on people's browsers for the information about where the link is coming from. Only some browsers support this, and it is easily disabled in the browsers that do.
So, we would have to either break the link for people whose browser does not send information about the referring site OR allow direct linking when we don't know where the link is coming from. Since we do not want to break links when we shouldn't, we would end up allowing direct linking to sites that were not in the list of ok sites. This is why we didn't implement it.

-Emily

[arhuaco]

Couldn't you just create the links from a photo that is stored in a private gallery.

[arjunrc]

Ah ok - thanks Emily - was not sure of the internal implementation challenges. It makes sense the way you describe it.

To arhuco: Yes,I guess what you suggest is possible. I can always create a new gallery called direct links and just link images from other galleries into this gallery for direct linking.

regds
arjun

We thought about adding an option to specify some direct linking sites that are ok. However, implementing this means relying on people's browsers for the information about where the link is coming from. Only some browsers support this, and it is easily disabled in the browsers that do.
So, we would have to either break the link for people whose browser does not send information about the referring site OR allow direct linking when we don't know where the link is coming from. Since we do not want to break links when we shouldn't, we would end up allowing direct linking to sites that were not in the list of ok sites. This is why we didn't implement it.

-Emily

[sheila]

Ah ok - thanks Emily - was not sure of the internal implementation challenges. It makes sense the way you describe it.

To arhuco: Yes,I guess what you suggest is possible. I can always create a new gallery called direct links and just link images from other galleries into this gallery for direct linking.

regds
arjun

-Emily

[/quote]

I tried that, Arjun but it doesn't work. It still retains the same ID number regardless of the copying from a disabled gallery to the enabled direct link gallery. Or it didn't work when I tried

Cheers
Sheila

[arjunrc]

Yes, sheila - I did not try it, but the same though occured to me.

If I were just to link it to another gallery and disable direct link there, I am assuming it would not work since, as you say, the link would be the same. I guess the only way for this to work is for me to reupload that image seperately again to the protected gallery.

Thats quite a pain. I think its worth it to rely on browsers behaving and let us enable an allow/deny list too.

regds
arjun

[stl_don]

If I direct link like this:
http://www.pbase.com/stl_don/image/45121302 dot jpg
all works fine.
But, if I use this
http://www.pbase.com/stl_don/image/45121302/original dot jpg
nothing but the dreaded red-x

Of course the above examples have a "." and not "dot".

Don

[roberthouse]

I meant to comment on this earlier, but must have forgotten...Thanks for doing this (!), I've hoped for this feature for a long time.

I generally like to link to the html page and not the image, so it was a little irritating when photos showed up as being direct-linked, with nothing I could do about it; now I can control that.

For those who want more options, this was a pretty general improvement that benefits a lot of people. If you need specific customization, it's kind of asking a lot. Why not just have a hidden gallery where you upload photos that you want to direct link to? That's simple enough to do, and doesn't require too much effort. We all may have little things we'd like that may benefit us personally, but expecting pbase to be customized for our specific needs may be asking too much.

[fredharmon]

I am having all kind of problems direct linking images. Sometimes the image loads, and sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes I can reload a page with two direct linked images on it, and one will load and the other won't and when I load it again, they will switch, and sometimes both will load and sometime neither will load.

It is VERY frustrating. I have direct linking turned on for my account and have paid my account up to date. What do I have to do to get this to work?