The spam protection is worth repeating.
I made one of these back in 2005 and it was inevitably gangloaded with questionable content like p*rn, malware, software license keys, copyrighted material, etc.
I made one of these back in 2005 and it was inevitably gangloaded with questionable content like p*rn, malware, software license keys, copyrighted material, etc.
Someone had posted ~500 pictures of "naked kids", a Canadian bot had found them and notified my host provider, who automatically took action.
Everything happened in less than 30 minutes, between the first picture being uploaded and the server being shutdown.
First I tried to restart the server and clean it, but I received new notifications as soon as it was online. So I just restored the last backup before it all started. And I removed the ability for public users to upload pictures.
I will never ever publish a service allowing user to upload publicly any content.
It soon became apparent that this is not ideal.
Same thing with tools that would try to archive Imgur, the results basically need manual review because the resulting dataset is a loaded gun.