Migrate All Your Avatars
We're back! Here's a TLDR:
- We added a new Avatar Migration Tool for Premium users that lets you migrate all your avatars to Tupperbox's CDN with one button press.
- Images hosted on Tupperbox's CDN will never link rot so long as a tupper is still using it.
- If you've ever had premium but don't have it right now, you have until May 19th to press the button for free.
- We're working on a page for the dashboard to help you manage your scoped settings (like autoproxy).
- We're planning on adding variants as the next big feature for Tupperbox.
Image Hosting and Link Rot
You know how there's that thing where sometimes you upload your tupper avatar and then Discord purges the image you uploaded and it disappears forever and then you join our Support Server to ask us why it's broken and there's nothing anyone can do? That's called link rot and it's a huge pain. This is why from the beginning one of the most important features of Premium has been to automatically mirror your avatars to a permanent image host, so that your tupper's avatar will never disappear.
Sounds pretty great! When we were originally setting this up, we had to decide where to host the images, with image permanence being top priority. How about Imgur? They're a big name in permanent anonymous image hosting for online apps! They even offer a decently affordable API for image uploads, that'll work perfectly!
Imgrrrrrr...
So Imgur has decided to start purging old anonymously uploaded images. This means is that any images uploaded to Imgur without an account (Example: All of the images we have paid to upload through their API, as well as most of the images y'all have been uploading to Imgur) may be deleted at any time after May 15th, 2023.
What this means for us is that many of your six million or so (we checked) tupper avatars that are currently hosted on Imgur may start to suffer the exact same link rot issues that those uploaded through Discord face.
We at Tupperbox respect Imgur's decision to do this, and have transitioned to running our own hosting service for premium users instead.
For free users, we'd recommend taking a look at your tuppers' avatars and consider re-hosting their images on a different platform than Imgur.
Tupperbox CDN
It took us a bit of work but as of a few months ago, all premium users' newly set avatars have been getting uploaded to Tupperbox's own proprietary CDN. Since we control this one, we can personally guarantee that avatars your tuppers are using will never link rot, so long as they've been uploaded to our CDN. Unfortunately, this only applied to avatars that have been uploaded through the bot or website after getting premium, and after the update which took us off of Imgur.
Avatar Migration Tool
Introducing the Avatar Migration Tool!
We were planning on working on this tool after some other features had been released, but given that Imgur will no longer be protecting their images from link rot on May 15th, 2023 (In 10 days at time of writing), we chose to fast forward development on this. The tool allows you to press a single button, and automatically start reuploading all your existing avatars to the Tupperbox CDN!
Unfortunately, if any of your tupper's avatars have already been deleted, there is no way to recover those, you'll still need to re-upload those by hand. This definitely won't affect avatars hosted on Imgur until the 15th. After that, we're not sure what'll happen exactly.
This is a Premium-only feature, but until May 19th, 2023, anyone who has ever had premium, including those that got it from the survey, will be able to press that button.
All you have to do is press the button and we'll try to download every single avatar your tuppers are currently using and re-upload them to our CDN! Handy, isn't it? Should work fine so long as nobody blocks our servers from downloading images...
Imgrrrrrr part 2
Unfortunately, we've run into a snag where Imgur sometimes blocks us for hours at a time from downloading all the images we paid to upload to them. As a result we've implemented a fallback feature on the tool which allows you to use your device's internet connection to attempt to migrate any images which we were unable to download.
Use this switch if your internet connection is good and you don't have a data limit.
Intermission
Whew, that was a lot. How about a short break?
Click here if you want to see a cute picture of a moth.
Upcoming Features
That's not all we've been working on! We've been chewing our way through bugs on the website, and on the bot. After thoroughly analyzing our survey data and getting feedback from our users on the Support Server, we've decided on the next most important features we want to bring you.
User Settings Page
Wouldn't it be nice if you could edit your Tupperbox settings for any given server, channel, or thread, all on the website? Soon you'll be able to!
The design for this is still in the works, but in the end it should work a lot like the Tupper List page of the dashboard, with a list of your Discord servers, categories, channels, and threads on the left, and then a configuration panel on the right.
This feature will be available to both free and premium users.
Tupper Variants
Introducing Variants! The idea is pretty simple, you have one Tupper with multiple Variants per Tupper. You can use these Variants to change the display name and avatar of any given Tupper for the proxy you're doing, allowing you to express different states for your Tuppers!
While the idea is simple, the execution on the code-side is kind of tricky and requires us to restructure how brackets work internally. When the update rolls out, we'll have more information on how the restructure will work. We're not entirely sure how long this will take to finish, but we're hoping to roll this feature out Soon™.
This feature will be available to both free and premium users.
Edit: Due to difficulty in providing a quality implementation, this feature has been cancelled, and we will be implementing multiple smaller organization features to replicate some of the functionality.
Wrap-Up
That's all we've got for now, if you're a premium user go use the Avatar Migration Tool! If you need help or have feedback to give, as always, everyone is welcome to join our Support Server.
~ Gasparr, Amphibious Webmaster