12

I recently made a post with an image in it that had some mildly sensitive information that I forgot to blur out.

I edited the image, then edited the post and replaced it. I managed to do it during the grace period, so plebs such as myself aren't able to go back and look. I'm satisfied with that.

But I'm wondering, mostly out of curiosity, who can see grace period edit histories? Site mods? Community mods? Employees? Special employees? Joel? Shog9 through his top secret backdoor that I promised him I'd never mention in public?

Improve this question
4
  • 4
    the revision is over written so no one has access to it IIRC but if you uploaded the image to imgur then the first image will still be there, if you have the url. Shog9 and Joel left the building so you don't need to worry about them in this context.
    – rene
    Feb 18, 2021 at 20:27
  • @rene oh boy i'm out of the loop; no more Joel, huh. no comment. good note about the images.
    – Jason C
    Feb 18, 2021 at 20:34
  • 3
    If you uploaded the image then the image still exists on imgur somewhere.
    – Cave Johnson
    Feb 18, 2021 at 20:36
  • The Eye in the Sky sees all.
    – Rob
    Feb 18, 2021 at 21:13

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
14

It's not stored in a database, but I wouldn't be surprised if it is still logged:

  1. Log all your inbound traffic. We keep logs on all in-bound connections. This enabled all of our investigations. You can’t investigate what you don’t log.

Whether they rely on standard IIS logs (which log URLs and some headers) or log POST bodies as well, I can't tell.

Also, one of the community projects out there may have noticed your new post through one of the websockets and retrieved the initial version through e.g. the API. Now and then, we see a post in Metasmoke which seems gibberish, but on the site it looks normal. (Or the other way around.) In those cases, the author edited the post during the grace period, but the original version is still archived somewhere.

What @rene says in the comments about the image being on imgur's servers is also true; the IDs are fairly random but it's plausible somebody accidentally stumbles on the image. I'm not sure if images from i.stack.imgur.com are shown on the Newest feed but haven't we all tried putting random characters in the URL and see what we get?

Improve this answer
1
  • 7
    I believe that somewhere the POST bodies are indeed logged (and think someone has tracked one down below for some case I don't remember). But the logs that are stored in the databases that allow us to easily analyze traffic do not contain that information. But your last paragraph is more relevant. Some scrapers grab data almost immediately after it is posted. If the image contained sensitive information, then contact us to have the image itself removed if the URL is still available.
    – animuson StaffMod
    Feb 18, 2021 at 20:39

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .