me who always refused to use discord no matter what, therefore not using discord for file-hosting reason:
Edit: THE END TIMES ARE HERE!!! FIND A FILE HOST NOW!!!
Discord has officially put this change in place. As of 2/23/24, files hosted on discord will not be accessible outside of discord. I personally reccomend postimage for images and filegarden for audio, more details below.
IMPORTANT: i've been seeing a lot of comments about how this is a bad decision on discord's part. While discord DOES make a lot of bad decisions, THIS ISN'T ONE OF THEM - while using discord as a file host for external websites was convenient, it was also abuse of their server space. Discord is a chat client with infrastructure made to bear the weight of messaging. It does not have the server capacity to act as a media host. Media hosting for other sites (the only thing this change impacts) is very resource-heavy, and not all services are equipped to bear that load. This change was put in place to prevent discord's finite server space from being misused, and this is something that websites have been doing in various ways since the 2000s for the same reason. PLEASE USE DESIGNATED SERVICES FOR YOUR FILES, "WELL IT WORKS FOR NOW" WILL ONLY HURT YOU LATER
- love, your friendly neighborhood netizen
anyway back to your regularly scheduled post, reorganized because this has happened now. sorry if it's a mess
more info in this tumblr post, i decided to share it here because i use discord for the audio files i use in my codes :( essentially, links to things hosted on discord will expire shortly after the link is made, so you won't be able to use links to discord messages (including images or text files) permanently outside of discord.
Now is a great time to find actual image/file hosting places because discord uhhhh was never for that anyway. I'll be working on ways to use audio files hosted on other storage sites so when the change goes out i can help people with my codes. There's a list of hosting sites in the tumblr post, I personally use imgur for most of my stuff! < don't do this. see update below
i might also repost this/a link to the thread here in service reviews bc i know a lot of people use discord to host proof screenshots 😬
Avistella has provided a nice selection of alternatives in this comment, and theglitzyhive has a bulletin here with his own list of alternatives and some offline content preservation tips you may find useful. please check out these resources!
moif made this tool that provides a discord-like interface for accessing files on your google drive like you've been doing on discord! Thank you so much for making this!
Thanks to ferdie for mentioning that the images themselves aren't lost! You can paste the image url back into discord, and it'll still work, so you can save them from there and reupload them somewhere else! THIS HAS BEEN CONFIRMED TO WORK BY OTHER USERS - HANG ONTO YOUR LINKS!
some clarifications for people reading this thread, who aren't that well versed in how image hosting works!
Will this effect images in your servers? No. The ONLY thing this will effect is links from other websites outside of discord to media in discord messages. Nothing in your servers or messages is getting deleted. We don't have enough information to know how this will effect things between servers, though, so I can't speak on that.
What is an image host? For people on the internet to see an image from your computer, it has to be hosted somewhere on the internet with a permanent web address, and whenever someone loads a web page with that image on it, the page on their screen has to be able to read that web address to retrieve the image from your host and display it. Most sites can host the images used on their own pages without issue, for example, toyhouse hosting the images in your characters' galleries and user avatars. For things beyond the scope of what the site allows their servers to store, an image hosting service outside the site is needed - for example, the images used in peoples' user layouts and character codes.
What is hotlinking? Hotlinking is when you take a link to an image hosted on someone else's server and use that link to serve the image on your website. For example, if I uploaded a picture to my own website on my own server, and you copied the same link to it on my server for your own website. Hotlinking from sites that don't have the server space for it is bad! Because you have to get the image from its host every single time someone loads the page it's on, hotlinking to a server that was meant for one website will put multiple websites' worth of strain on the server. This was a cardinal sin in the 2000s, but they don't teach this stuff anymore.
"ALTERNATIVES" THAT ARE NOT ALTERNATIVES: Imgur and neocities!!! I keep seeing people suggest imgur as neocities for hotlinking purposes. Imgur's TOS forbids doing this (and they make it super hard to do anyway) and they'll ban you from the site if they find out. Neocities blocks hotlinking entirely, which is what discord has chosen to do. THEY WILL HOST YOUR IMAGES, BUT YOU CAN'T HOTLINK TO THEM ON YOUR SITES.
mawibblap i use discord how it's intended, save for the audio files because hosting those has always been a pain for me... but i also grew up in the 2000s when hotlinking was a cardinal sin and image hosting sites were a basic part of web design, so i'm kinda shocked at how many people just... don't know how to do it the right way now. i guess people are learning the hard way why you use a designated service for these things.
Oh geez, that sucks, I know many people host their stuff on Discord. I used to use DA's stash but the links are hella long and sometimes they broke for no reason. I switched to host them here on TH, as Resources, unwatermarked images but profile itself only visible to me. Seems to be working fine (tho if this is a bad idea pls tell me lmao)
Edit: I'm not a coder, just for my own profiles and stuff, so there's not as many images as other coders.
Reinforcing what I said on page 1, I already host a lot of my character images on my Linode VPS (especially full-rez references that I can't upload directly to TH because not premium), just gotta expand that to include resources I use for profile work.
Has Discord said anything about this officially? i won't believe it unless they have and so far it doesn't seem like they have said anything about it
At most i share images within Discord, i rarely share the image's link, let alone use them in coding
Maaaaan, this sucks. I get why they are doing it, but it was super convenient to just grab a link from my private image server rather than uploading it to another website. Guess I have to start using the imgur I made but never actually used much of now.
im more or so pretty alright but a bit upset with it; I don't use coding except for 2 exceptions, so its not gonna be a problem to find another place to host images. However I do use discord to send WIPs to people, and ik stash is an alternate, but it doesn't do it as fast as I do it with discord since I have to log in
CynicalPoison I don't think they've said anything about it yet, but with the features they're implementing (keys within file links that expire shortly after the link is made) it's more likely than not that this is going to happen, logistically speaking. As it turns out, a LOT of people have been using their servers to hotlink images to the web, which other sites (like neocities) have put in measures to prevent as well. Considering how many users discord's servers have to deal with for the app's intented purpose, I can't see any reason why they wouldn't want to prevent what i'd imagine they consider to be abuse of their server space.
regardless of whether it's impending or not-so-impending of a change, so many people use a chat client to store their important files that it's scary. Even if they weren't going to go the way of neocities, knowing that there are designated services for that (and finding out from others how they store their things) is pretty important imo
Beta_ i love situational irony (i can;t even tell if this was intentional or not but it's really funny LMAOO 😭😭)
GutterGlitter, that's great to know, thank you!! :o i'll def have a look at imgur for image hosting then!
NO WAY, I always used to say stuff like "I'd be fucked the day Discord stops working" because of how I've been using it to store so much information and now that day has come? Did I jinx it? Welp, I have Google Photos so I guess I'll just stick to that until I reach my 100 GB limit.
Also, to everyone here saying "Well I post my images on ToyHouse so I'll be fine!" that isn't really a reliable solution. Let's be real, this site has one moderator, has had no major changes made to the site for years, and regularly has cloudflare outages. This site is not a reliable site to be your only place to store images. If you have images that are only backed up on ToyHouse and nowhere else, I urge you to consider backing them up literally anywhere else additionally.
I'm also not 100% sure if this is true (please correct me if it's not, I'm curious on it) but I've heard that ToyHouse slightly greys your images a bit when you upload them, to save space? So I personally avoid using images downloaded off of ToyHouse for anything just in case they are slightly altered from the original image.