Hello World,
we’ve just updated our tooling that scans uploaded images for illegal content.
We don’t expect this to cause any issues. If you do experience any issues with uploads or media in general please let us know.
This will hopefully improve the current situation where sometimes previews, thumbnails or entire images have gone missing after they were posted.
Uploads will now be scanned at the time they are created, which should result in immediate feedback when uploads are rejected.
I haven’t seen the actual error message displayed, but “failed external validation” is definitely how the scanning process works.
By illegal we are not referring to copyrighted content or anything like that, only much more serious things.
Unfortunately, this will sometimes falsely identify content that should be allowed. In the past this would have silently erased the image shortly after the upload, with this only becoming noticeable days after the upload due to caching.
Ah ok. It is understandable that there will be some false positives. I understand it better now, thanks for the explanation.