[Toolserver-l] no more thumbnails (access denied to thumb.php)

[Daniel Kinzler]

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.png/170px-Meerkatmascotfull.png

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 :)