Chat truncates regular imgur links when they end in 's', 'm', 'l', 'h', ...

Question

I have ShareX installed and configured to upload screenshots to Imgur (not Stack Imgur, for perhaps obvious reasons; just Imgur).

Chat likes to mangle those links by cutting the image hash part short. For example this image URL:

http://i.imgur.com/7zct02s.png

Gets rendered like so:

<a rel="nofollow" href="//i.imgur.com/7zct02.png">
  <img src="http://i.imgur.com/7zct02s.png" class="user-image" alt="user image">
</a>

Actual message on chat with the mangled link. The image is embedded properly, but clicking on it gets you a 404.

Chat notices that the hash ends with an s (7zct02s) and thinks the link goes to the thumbnail version of the picture. It tries thus to be helpful and link to the actual picture. However, the thumbnail URL version is actually 7zct02ss. I believe it's likely that chat doesn't expect Imgur hashes to be 7 characters long, especially when most imgur images on chat are 5 character long stack.imgur hashes.

The same happens with m, l, t and whatever other characters imgur uses to automagically resize pictures.

Answer 1

Considering Stack Exchange uses the Imgur API, they should query Imgur to see if an image with that hash exists instead of blindly stripping the trailing character. If the image exists, leave the URL alone.

For your example, SE would query to see if an image with the hash 7zct02s exists.

Then, display the thumbnail, but link to the full size image.

Answer 2

Chat should avoid employing this kind of magic altogether; allowing people to link to a different image than they onebox breaks expectations and can potentially lead to this sort of abuse.