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This is a two-part bug report.

We had a flag on 2011 Moderator Election - Town Hall Chat Digest that the avatars weren't loading, and because it was meta, a user couldn't edit it.

All the answers but one loaded their images properly.

I edited the bad answer to see this:

enter image description here

So the two problems are

  1. Images seem to force the use of https now, but not for existing links? Editing somehow triggers the images to not-load in that one answer.
    Possible answer: search and replace the whole site for gravatar.com/avatar/ links and swap them to https?

  2. The text still says and links to Imgur.

This is an election Q&A from 2011 so the posts are all older, not sure if relevant.

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  • 5
    As far as bug 1, there was a routine run to replace old non-HTTPS image embeds with links in posts' rendered HTMLs (without editing them), but this never ran on per-site metas for some reason. (There were also some other missed cases, such as the regex failing to catch capital <IMG tags.) The bug also affects cases of editing posts where the re-render did work - those have to be replaced with HTTPS images on the next edit.
    – Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog
    Commented May 17 at 21:54
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    “Images seem to force the use of https now, but not for existing links?” My guess: it would not work with websites that don't support HTTPS. It may work for gravatar but not other websites.
    – A.L - say no to AI
    Commented May 20 at 11:20
  • @A.L-saynotoAI yeah true - perhaps that could be part of the conversion process, to test the URL via http and https and see if the output is the same. If so, change to https. You're absolutely right there are websites out there that listen for https, but serve a generic error page. Also the question of whether an https link with an expired or self-signed cert is "acceptable"
    – Criggie
    Commented May 20 at 21:11
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    @Criggie regarding bug #2, I'm unable to reproduce the notice you're seeing (All image URLs must start with https://) when I press edit for the post you linked. How are you getting that to display?
    – tanj92 Staff
    Commented May 20 at 21:26
  • @tanj92 try this bicycles.meta.stackexchange.com/posts/515/edit that should edit the last post, starts with "Neil Fein asked: Let's say a question is bad enough to need...." At least two of the other answers were edited already to include https before I thought to report here.
    – Criggie
    Commented May 21 at 0:08
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    Thanks @Criggie I can see it now. Will submit a ticket.
    – tanj92 Staff
    Commented May 22 at 15:50
  • @tanj92 The link in my comment above contains a link to an SEDE query to find instances of this.
    – Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog
    Commented May 22 at 21:19
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    Do you know what purpose the salmon/pink colored notice serves? It appears to be triggered using the *! markdown.
    – tanj92 Staff
    Commented May 28 at 22:12
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    I've never seen it ever... so its possibly something uncommon enough no one remembers - considering the context though, I wonder if it was a confluence of the time the network transitioned to HTTPS (so 'breaking' a http image would be desirable) and legacy gravatar avatars. Having http images would 'break' strict HTTPS compliance, and this seems a relatively 'soft' way to fix this.
    – Journeyman Geek
    Commented May 29 at 0:59
  • @JourneymanGeek I suspect a simple search/replace on the backend for http://gravatar.com with https would fix some proportion of these. For other image links, perhaps a script could get both the http and https version of any existing http image link, and if the results are the same then update link to https otherwise (maybe) get the http image and post it in i.sstatic.net Not sure if the rules would permit that last part.
    – Criggie
    Commented May 29 at 4:22

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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Thanks for reporting this. It has been fixed:

enter image description here

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Testing with this image link http://criggie.org.nz/crap/aaa2.gif

http://criggie.org.nz/crap/aaa2.gif

http://criggie.org.nz/crap/aaa2.gif

Looks like this ->> <img src="http://criggie.org.nz/crap/aaa2.gif"> in a post is enough to show the pink box while editing that post.

http://criggie.org.nz/crap/aaa2.gif

It appears the same for both HTML markup and for regular SE markup.

Where using https shows the image fine:

enter image description here

Hit [edit] on this answer to see it.

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    Thanks, we were able to pin point this where we are doing some checks in the text editor, this was likely related to the HTTP --> HTTPS migration.
    – tanj92 Staff
    Commented May 29 at 17:52

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