[Solved / Fixed] Broken Profile Images

[aFrInaTi0n]

Hello Community,

unfortunately some change I applied yesterday had unforseeable negative effects, which just started to get visible by today. Right now most / half of the profile pictures are not shown correctly.

We are invesigating the incident and are in contact with the vendor already to apply the right solution as soon as possible.

Sorry for the inconveniences already!

It may possibly take at least a day for getting an answer from the vendor. I will hand an update here latest tomorrow evening (German time).

[Sven J]

I know it doesn't really belong here, but as you refer to broken images, perhaps I may mention it:
"Featured" models don't appear with a picture on the front page, they're just listed in the side bar, whereas the models from which images are shown are not marked as "featured" in their respective forums.

Is this a bug?

[aFrInaTi0n]

I may need to check, and there is no wrong place for such questions or reports - please feel always free to create a topic for anything which you find buggy.

For me "Admin" means, I shall be there for your concerns always and in any cases. Don't ever hesitate to ask. 

[Yperio_Bricks]

31 minutes ago, Sven J said:

I know it doesn't really belong here, but as you refer to broken images, perhaps I may mention it:
"Featured" models don't appear with a picture on the front page, they're just listed in the side bar, whereas the models from which images are shown are not marked as "featured" in their respective forums.

Is this a bug?

I think it has always been like this. There were 'frontpaged' topics shown with images and maybe additional text on the portal page and there were 'featured' topics that are shown in the list of featured topics only. But while we are at it, the frontpaged threads miss an icon in the sub-forums? They are not recognizable in their respective sub-forums anymore. Featured topics still get the 'featured' sign.

[Sven J]

@Yperio_Bricks Oh, really? I have always thought "frontpaged" and "featured" were the same, but maybe I have been mistaken.

[aFrInaTi0n]

It may come from some technical backgrounds as the "featured" flag may have been used in an old implementation for putting items on the frontpage. Right now that component is considered deprecated - that is also why since some weeks we ahve to manually post things to the Frontpage. Huge kudos for @MKJoshA putting much more timely needed into those tasks!

So yes, the "Featured" Icon in front of a topic title may also be missing still - that may be an older bug then and those should be not showing since ~1y. But will be put to my list of "less urgent" topics to dig deeper for reasons - at least I remember I created the icon..

 

On 1/18/2025 at 7:34 PM, aFrInaTi0n said:

Implemented some higher quality icons

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[aFrInaTi0n]

Hello, here comes the next update: Unfortunately the vendor told us this case is new to them and they can currently not assure a working solution. We have still some idea of what may work to revert the status to the former state - but this is untested from the vendor. Before I will start with any work I need to do some more quality messurements for assuring us ways back into working states for cases things going south.

So I would like to inform the community already:

We have planned to work on the issue tonight to hopefully solve it with our fix. So please expect partial short outages of the forum later in the evening. *canceled

I will update the announcement message shortly before I start working on the topic, so you should get awareness of the moment.

Sorry for the inconveniences again from my side!

[aFrInaTi0n]

Next  update:

• The issue is reproducible in our test environment
• I found a manual fix, but am not yet applying this as need want to wait for @Jims opinion / last word for applying this

In consequence I may ask to give us another day, until we can bring them back.

The planned work is hereby canceled for tonight.

Next update can be expected latest tomorrow early evening.

[MKJoshA]

On 1/6/2026 at 1:21 AM, Sven J said:

@Yperio_Bricks Oh, really? I have always thought "frontpaged" and "featured" were the same, but maybe I have been mistaken.

 

On 1/6/2026 at 12:34 AM, Yperio_Bricks said:

I think it has always been like this. There were 'frontpaged' topics shown with images and maybe additional text on the portal page and there were 'featured' topics that are shown in the list of featured topics only. But while we are at it, the frontpaged threads miss an icon in the sub-forums? They are not recognizable in their respective sub-forums anymore. Featured topics still get the 'featured' sign.

As aFrinaTi0n stated, "Featured" is a button Mods can push to highlight a build. It used to auto-frontpage as well, but doesn't right now. So I've been manually front-paging but forgetting to "feature" most of the time 

On 1/6/2026 at 1:46 AM, aFrInaTi0n said:

It may come from some technical backgrounds as the "featured" flag may have been used in an old implementation for putting items on the frontpage. Right now that component is considered deprecated - that is also why since some weeks we ahve to manually post things to the Frontpage. Huge kudos for @MKJoshA putting much more timely needed into those tasks!

Gotta earn my keep somehow!

[Yperio_Bricks]

1 hour ago, MKJoshA said:

As aFrinaTi0n stated, "Featured" is a button Mods can push to highlight a build. It used to auto-frontpage as well, but doesn't right now. So I've been manually front-paging but forgetting to "feature" most of the time 

Sorry, then I was wrong. All the years I thought there were two different options of highlighting a build. My mocs got both treatments too and so I really thought 'frontpaged' and 'featured' (with and without picture) were different options. My bad!

[Sven J]

Thank you @aFrInaTi0n and @MKJoshA for the explanation!

[aFrInaTi0n]

I did only break things - as always..  

[aFrInaTi0n]

Hey folks, I had a very long day and do not have any brainjuice left today to tackle the issue without fearing to do mistakes. I will shift my fixture to tomorrow.

[Toastie]

2 hours ago, aFrInaTi0n said:

I did only break things

YOU DID NOT. Damned. You were >trying out< things. And when this stupid forum software allows you to do that - without screaming at you: "DO YOU REALLY WANT TO ERASE ALL FILES ON THIS FLOPPY DISK?" (Yes, there are machines still running fine in my home office, just knowing ALL CAPS) - then it's - >their< fault. Over and out.

I simply admire the time and effort, you and other fine individuals running EB, put into this endeavor. Which, as far as I overlook the history of internet forums, not only having this kind of overall activity, but also not on >multiple< levels, is simply wonderful. This is a caring, diverse, grown-up, mutually respecting, tolerating virtual place to be (for me).

And believe me: Some pictures missing (for the time being, or forever), as long as I know people tried (that is you, Christoph), does not make ANY difference to me: I love to be here. With or without "picture".

All the best
Thorsten

[aFrInaTi0n]

Hehe Toastie, thanks again - but I was working with too much assumptions of "worked before, shall work fine" - so by own meassurement of "quality delivered" or not, I can clearly see improvements for the next time. And believe me please, I am not mad at myself - it seems only I took over plenty of the attitude of my grandmother, she always was honest in all regards and put herself behind any truth. I learned that value-system is the right one for me.

I am totally ok to make mistakes every day (as long as it may be new mistakes but not the same over and over again) - how should I learn new things otherwise?! 

btw why do we Germans - known for our wonderful very unique & overcomplicated word creations - exceptionally only have one Word "Verantwortung" when in the English language has two different ones with different meanings to offer?!

[aFrInaTi0n]

Next days update:

• I still need to do some quality control to my found solution, working on that now
• When I got confident enough I may later on in the night add my fix - I may not need any maintenance downtime for that.

Will hand in another update later this evening.

[aFrInaTi0n]

Next update of this night: Did my QC and think my fix will be fine, but as it is 1 AM already, I will leave it for today

I will have another fresh QC review over everything to not have forgotten some important thought and then finally apply by tomorrow.

[aFrInaTi0n]

As you may have recognized I did not apply my fixture yet - instead I think I fully understand the source of the issue & reported my findings to the vendor.

My hopes are they can verify my findings and deliver us a vendor-verified way of fixing this. I personally prefer this as the best solution, as any non-vendor-approved one may create us unknown issues in the future at worst (true for all IT issues, believe my professional expertise ).

[aFrInaTi0n]

Next little update: The vendor will have a look with their developer team, but they told I may not expect to get a solution delivered soon. In a side sentence it has been mentioned that my approach may work - I consider this no clear "better don't, it may break other things".

[aFrInaTi0n]

As it is Monday already: I did not find the right spot over the weekend to work on the topic. Goal is to find the right spot this week / the next weekend latest.

[aFrInaTi0n]

I will finally start working on fixing the situation today, starting 11 AM UTC.
 

• Site will stay online
• Maintenance may have effects in some elements possibly not rendering correctly. For those cases please reload the page after some minutes and views should be fine again (CTRL+F5 for a reload instructing the browser to reload all elements may be benefitial then - but please don't hammer us down )
• Updated the Announcement to stay in the top view for the time I am working on the issue

Expect another post of me for a (hopefully final) status later.

[aFrInaTi0n]

The fix has been applied already.

At first glance it seems it did the job to restore all not-showing images again.

 

Next step: I will check all exact profile image URLs to be tested with opening them via their URL to see, if any images may be missing.

If anybody finds his profile image still missing after a CTRL+F5 reload of the page, please post to this thread!

[aFrInaTi0n]

QA Update: Fix restored 99% of the profile images with success.


Tested all ~27k profile Image URLs:

Successful (HTTP 200):  27024
Errors:                   140
Errordetails:      errors.log

I will take a closer look the the minor errors reported still to see if I can help them.

[Murdoch17]

Thank you @aFrInaTi0n for all your hard work!

[aFrInaTi0n]

As always: no issue.

Helped for better future understanding of how the product works.. :)