Hello all

As of today, access to thumb.php has been disabled for performance reasons. (Update: TimStarling offered to re-enable it for now. But it WILL go away SOON).

Thumbnail images need to be accessed by their real path, like

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/99/Meerkatmascotfull.p...

Note that this will work for any size, if a thumbnail in the requested size doesn't exist, it is created on-the-fly. There are two problems with this:

1) you have to know if the image is on commons or not 2) you have to know the path for the images of a given wiki (in this case, "/wikipedia/commons")

Note that Special:FilePath SHOULD NOT BE USED to get the URL of the full size image, for performance reasons.

You should also NOT USE THE API to get the actual URL - for the same reason. We have to get all info needed locally from the toolserver, from the database or otherwise.

The best solution IMHO would be a small script on the toolserver that, given a wiki, an image, and a size, will generate an HTTP redirect to the image file. This would require us to maintain a database of URL prefixes for all wikis - could be done as a new column in toolserver.wiki. And for each request, the script needs to run a query to see if the image is uploaded locally or not.

I'll not be able to build such a script for a while, because I'm quite busy. DaB said he'd look into it. Let's hope for the best.

-- Daniel

PS: @river: this should really go to to toolser-announce. apparently, i can't post there. please change that :)