A WikiPost Issue and a Work-around

[chown33]

This thread is about a limitation I recently came across regarding older WikiPosts. First, I'll describe the limitation, then I'll describe a work-around.

A WikiPost is a special kind of opening post in a thread. It allows anyone with sufficient privileges to edit that opening post later. This can be used to keep information collected from multiple posts in a single place.


Recently, I was investigating an issue where an older WikiPost was no longer able to have images attached to it. The text of the WikiPost could be edited, but no new attachments could be made. They were rejected with an error message:

You do not have permission to view this page or perform this action. If you are trying to start a new thread, you are in the wrong forum.

The problematic thread was started on 1 Mar 2017, which makes it more than 7 years old.

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My first thought was there might be a time limit on the editing of WikiPosts, like maybe 5 or 6 years. The odd thing about such a limit is that it would only apply to attachments, not to text. Older WikiPosts still allow editing of the post's text.

To see if I could test this hypothesis on an older WikiPost, I went to search for WikiPosts that were between 5 and 6 years old. This went nowhere, because "WikiPost" isn't a searchable criterion in the site's Advanced Search.

My next idea was to try to find an annually repeating thread, such as the iPhone pre-order threads, which might tend to be WikiPosts. This didn't work out, either, as most of them weren't WikiPosts.

Next, I decided to look for older threads we have in a "moderator testing" forum, and convert one to a WikiPost and see what happens. This led to some interesting results.

The first thread I converted to a WikiPost was 4 yrs 6 mos old. It rejected all attempts to attach images, but accepted edits to its text. The next thread converted to a WikiPost was 2 yrs 4 mos old. It also rejected attachments. I then converted two threads that were 15 months and 11 months old, and they both rejected attachments.

This evidence suggests that WikiPosts older than about a year will not accept attachments. The actual time limit may be less than the 11 months I discovered in testing.

This restriction doesn't apply if you started the thread. For threads you started, you can still add attachments after at least 5 years. The post doesn't need to be a WikiPost, either.

For WikiPosts that reject attachments, I'll describe a work-around in the next post of this thread.

 

[chown33]

Work-Around to Add Images to Older WikiPosts

This work-around describes how to add images to older WikiPosts. It takes several steps, compared to the one-step or two-step process for an image attachment. You should always try using the normal attachment process first. Only use this work-around if that fails.

Before going through the steps, let's review how images are usually added to a post.

First, you open the post for editing by clicking the "Edit" button. You'll see this toolbar (or similar):

Next, click the "Insert Image" icon, between the "Insert Link" and "Smilies" icons, and this popup appears:

This defaults to the "attached image" type, which older WikiPosts won't accept.

Instead of dropping an image onto the target box, click the "By URL" icon, and the popup changes to a textbox where you type or paste the URL of an image resource.

This "by URL" option is how the work-around works.

To use the work-around, you don't start in the WikiPost itself. Instead, you add a new post to the thread, and attach your images there. This adds them to your Media library, and you can then copy the URLs and paste them into a "By URL" image reference.

The result will be an image in the WikiPost, but it won't be a WikiPost attachment. Instead, the image is attached to a separate post, and the WikiPost only links to that image.

This is unquestionably more complicated than the normal process of attaching an image to a post. Try attaching an image first, and only do the work-around if that fails.


Here's the step-by-step sequence. If you already have the images you want in your Media library, you can start at Step 4.

1. Add a post to the thread whose WikiPost you want to add images to.
   Technically, your post can be in any public thread, because it's just a "parking space" for your image attachments. However, to keep things on-topic, we recommend using the relevant thread.
   
2. Upload all the images you want to use in the WikiPost, attaching them to your new post.
   
3. Save the post with its attached images.
   
4. Go to your Media library.
   To do this, click your avatar in the post you just made, to get to your profile page. Click the "Media" tab and your images should appear.
   OR:
   Hover over your avatar icon, until it shows your summary popup. Under the "Media" label, click the number, and it will take you to your Media. The most recently uploaded images should be first.
   
5. Click one of the media images you want to add to the WikiPost. It will display the image alongside various metadata for the image.
   
6. Right-click on the image and choose "Copy Image Address" or whatever term your browser uses to mean "copy the image URL to the clipboard". You can check whether it worked by opening a new tab and pasting the URL into it. Typically, the URL will end with "/full".
   
7. With the image-URL in the clipboard, go to the WikiPost where you want to add the image.
   
8. Click "Edit" to edit the WikiPost, then click the "Insert Image" tool, and choose "by URL". Paste the URL into the textbox, then click "Insert". The image should appear in the post.
   
9. For adding multiple images, it may be convenient to copy and paste several image-URLs into a text file, such as a plain text TextEdit window. This lets you review the URLs before pasting them into the WikiPost.

 

[chown33]

Examples

Below are examples of "by URL" images. I've chosen one of the images attached to the post above, and another image from a completely different post in a different thread.

Before each image I've placed the BB codes for the "by URL" image.

[IMG]https://forums.macrumors.com/attachments/c-insert-image-by-url-png.2443942/[/IMG]

[IMG]https://forums.macrumors.com/media/img_1733_inset-jpg.834631/full[/IMG]

Finally, I've also used an image from Wikipedia, to show that the URL of the image can be anywhere.