Hi,
I just took the opportunity to check out ForeignApiRepo, aka InstantCommons alpha. It's pretty sweet. http://modernthings.org/mwfresh/index.php?title=User:Pfctdayelise I did a little dance when it really and truly worked!
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgForeignFileRepos#Using_files_from_Wikimedia_Commons_:_ForeignAPIRepo only says "keep in mind that you are hotlinking images from another site", and to somehow cache images locally if you have "a lot of visitors". Any suggestions on what a threshold for "a lot" is? Is some future development on this intended to have a local-caching option?
Is there any way for Wikimedia Commons users/admins to tell that an image is being used in this way? (I'm guessing not since we are still waiting for this native functionality for the Wikimedia universe...) Could some kind of filtered data log be made available perhaps via the toolserver so that we (community) can build a tool to check this? While I doubt third-party users would be a high priority for Commoners, it's still nice to avoid upsetting people by unexpectedly deleting their images if at all possible.
Which brings me to again another problem still existing within Wikimedia, how the local party can be informed of changes (overwrite uploads and deletions) to images that they are using via this method.
Is this maybe the kind of thing we should require people to register a key of some kind for? Then we would have a way of knowing how popular it is.
So, basically I would be interested to hear what the future plans for development for this will be.
thanks Brianna