Did Valve seriously break screenshot links for no reason?

Pocket

Half a Lambert is better than one.
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Nov 14, 2009
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I was in one of my map threads, and I noticed that the images were all broken. They were being hotlinked from Steam Screenshots, so I went into my gallery to see if they had indeed been deleted for some reason — thinking maybe Valve had a policy of auto-deleting old ones. But they're all still there. Thing is, the direct link is slightly different. It used to be "cloud.steampowered.com", but now it's "images.akamai.steamusercontent.com". Um, OK, why? Why change the URL to something harder to remember, and why not set up a redirect? And what the fuck is an akamai anyway?

For God's sake, Valve, you had one job, hosting files so people can link to them. All you had to do was nothing. You're supposed to be good at that!
 
Mar 23, 2013
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Same happened to my screenshots. If you replace the old cloud.steampowered.com with images.akamai.steamusercontent.com in your links, then they should be fixed.
 

YM

LVL100 YM
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Dec 5, 2007
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For God's sake, Valve, you had one job, hosting files so people can link to them. All you had to do was nothing. You're supposed to be good at that!

3 things wrong here:

No, actually everyone at valve is doing lots of things.
Doing nothing when changing hosting would have resulted in this change. Preventing it requires setting up a redirect.
Valve break things all the time. Send them an email politely explaining how they've goofed and ask them to fix it.
 

fubarFX

The "raw" in "nodraw"
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Jun 1, 2009
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I don't actually think steam intended to be an image sharing platform (outside of steam). They most likely let hotlinking slide because they have the infrastructure to support it and have more important things to do. They wouldn't goof something this badly if image hosting was their primary goal. But do write to them, they might care. I'm not valve I don't know these things. I guess it does screw up a lot of things on spuf which is technically part of steam. Point being, this has no real side effects inside of the steam client.
 

worMatty

Repacking Evangelist
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Jul 22, 2014
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Probably via an SQL query.
 

worMatty

Repacking Evangelist
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Jul 22, 2014
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There's this web site you can use to find out information about things you are unfamiliar with. It's called Dooble or something, can't remember. But I used it to look for information about Akamai and found this.
 

Yacan1

D I G I T A L I N F L U E N C E R
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Nov 7, 2010
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Once again
nooooo.png
 
Mar 23, 2013
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Oh, so it's a cloud service. But why couldn't Valve just keep on using their employee's computers as storage servers as they used to do?

After visual novels arrived at Steam, some employees were falsely accused to have hentai-images stored on their PCs
 

Pocket

Half a Lambert is better than one.
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Nov 14, 2009
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It's not like this was even a case where they were forced to use the third-party service's own URL, like Amazon Web Services does*, because the top-level domain is still something with "steam" in it. So... yeah, this makes no damn sense to me. This isn't even the first time their screenshots system changed its URL structure, but the last time they did set up a proper redirect.

*Incidentally, protip: never ever sign up for AWS or any other host that doesn't let you alias file URLs to your own domain, because if you ever decide to switch to somebody else, you'll be stuck in a situation like this where all the outside links break and you can't easily redirect them.
 

Pocket

Half a Lambert is better than one.
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Nov 14, 2009
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Couldnt we simply do a sitewide replacement of the old url structure?
I am, incidentally, in favor of this, if any admins are willing. This isn't the first time they've changed their URL structure, mind you (although the first time they did it they did provide a redirect), so you'll have two string structures to search for and modify, the cloud.steampowered.com one and... actually I forget what the other one was, but I think it had cloud servers with a bunch of different numbers in their subdomains so you'll have to throw an extra [0-9] into the search string somewhere.

I'll still be emailing Valve about it in case they're willing to listen. Which person or group, specifically, ought I be sending it to?