e569668

Just to follow up on this, contributors to kbin investigated and found that startrek.website appears to block user agents that contain "curl" in it now.

Example:

curl -v --user-agent "curl" https://startrek.website/pictrs/image/3ff1b940-75da-4e6b-8948-834ebd4b454c.jpeg

times out while:

curl -v --user-agent "anything-else" https://startrek.website/pictrs/image/3ff1b940-75da-4e6b-8948-834ebd4b454c.jpeg

works. kbin apparently sends User-Agent: Symfony HttpClient (Curl) in its requests for images, which is different than how it handles other fetch requests. they've made a PR to change kbin to send the user agent it uses elsewhere in those image requests https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/pulls/1098 once that is approved / merged they should start working again as instances update. It'd be nice if, assuming this is all accurate, the block on curl could be removed so people don't have to wait for the PR / instances to update but I understand if that is difficult

I do rarely see it on other kbins. Honestly kind of surprising considering kbin has no API. Not that it's super difficult to do some headless browser automation but it sort of seems like whoeever is doing it must be super dedicated to targeting kbin.

Do you mostly see it on m/random or other magazines? I've seen it elsewhere but it mostly seems to be from there. I kind of don't quite see the point in allowing threads / microblogs to be made from a local kbin instance to m/random. Threads especially, at least. I sort of am thinking it might be nice if m/random was locked from local posting so you had to file it under a magazine with moderators, but spam bots would likely just make their own magazines or spam others and that wouldn't really solve the problem.

This isn't really a me thing, this is kbin servers themselves. They all fetch the image from the posts and cache it to make thumbnails on their server which they host themselves. Ever since maintenance, the kbin instances appear to have trouble fetching the images to cache them. I'll try to gather more data from instance admins, perhaps something changed with the request/response headers or something else that is causing them to get blocked.

@Teppic
@HarkMahlberg

I don't disagree that could be tried, but I just doubt they would change that rule just for kbin, compared to kbin changing it from /media/ to anything else like /media/hash/ and avoiding the problem. I have to imagine most users of the fediverse use ublock and use the default lists

It looks like ever since this maintenance, no kbin instances can get images from startrek.website:

https://kbin.run/d/startrek.website
https://kbin.social/d/startrek.website?p=3
https://kbin.cafe/d/startrek.website?p=3
https://fedia.io/d/startrek.website/newest?p=4

(the links atm go to ~3 days ago when maintenance happened but ofc will start to drift as more posts are made)

You can see the thumbnails disappear exactly at the mark of the maintenance and ever since then they're gone. If you see thumbnails after that, they're usually wrong ones that are being loaded from different posts (there's a separate issue in for that now). I was wondering if you were aware of any issues or changes that happened because of this maintenance that would prevent kbin instances from fetching thumbnails? I've raised this in the kbin matrix chat as well

I believe you should be able to run it all locally without a hostname. The guides for doing so are here, depending on how you want to:
https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/wiki/Admin-Bare-Metal-Guide
https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/wiki/Admin-Docker-Guide

Someone just went through this themselves in the matrix kbin development channel so you could also potentially find help there if you're having issues. One thing that came up during that is https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/pulls/132 has a bunch of changes to those docs which might make it easier

@HarkMahlberg I assumed it was a default ublock rule and not one you added so I imagine a lot of people might run into this. Well, "a lot" depending on how often a filename's sha256 hash starts with ad. At the very least it's probably good to know about it, even if nothing is changed. But perhaps there's enough reason to use a different system to name image caches like the name generators a lot of image hosters seem to use. I guess it's in the devs hands now :) thanks for sharing it

@HarkMahlberg I would consider adding a bug for this to the issue tracker as it seems like a gotcha https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues

The issue is here https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/1019. It was fixed with a PR but I don't believe that PR has made it to kbin.social yet

I certainly wasn't trying to counter your post in any way or anything (especially as a non-kbin.social user), just provide information for people who might not be aware. kbin.social users basically have to see all of their posts with no way to interact or exchange with the other party, giving them little options. And for people who are unaware of this, they might be replying to their users in hopes of discussion or debate that will never happen

One thing to keep in mind is they don't federate with kbin.social; so they can't see your posts or replies, and can't reply to you. I believe your upvotes won't federate (maybe to other instances, but not to theirs at least). Downvotes work the same as they do for any other post as those don't federate in kbin to begin with. One-sided federation in the fediverse seems like it can be a bit confusing to users, I'm not sure in what case it's a good idea in since it can be like talking to a void.

Just to follow up on this KES has a magazine https://kbin.social/m/enhancement with install instructions. If you're able to use addons with how you browse kbin, you can rearrange it using this under Threads -> Rearrange post order. The suggested order has the reply box at the top