Some images from i.stack.imgur.com images only show an error message

Question

Some answers in How do you get a shell on a Mac? have images that only show an error from imgur saying: "The image you are requesting does not exist or is no longer available. imgur.com"

Is that expected behaviour or a bug somewhere?

Answer 1

This is a side effect of this:

For all posts made on or after August 17 2010, any image urls in the form of i.imgur.com were changed to i.stack.imgur.com network-wide.

This means, if …

• your post was made on or after August 17 2010

• you MANUALLY uploaded something to imgur, that is, outside of clicking the 'add image' button in our editor

• your image URL will be broken and you'll have to manually edit it back to the old i.imgur.com form

(please note this also implies your image will disappear after 6 months, unless you happen to own an imgur pro account for your own personal use..)

Sorry, we assumed that 99% of users would be using the default image upload support provided by the editor, so those users who deviated will be affected.

It would appear that John T uploaded to imgur, but did not use the Image Uploader, hence the image was not stored under Stack Exchange's imgur account.

The bad news is that the original image has also been deleted, leading to a image link rot.

_{which reminds me, I need to scour my previous posts and transfer them to Stack Exchange imgur account}