Remove Imgur
For previous discussions, see the issue of disabling Imgur which has yet to come to fruition.
- History
A thread was opened 1 year ago asking to disable this feature. A beautiful patch was offered at that time to do this obviously. It was suspiciously decided a "hidden configuration" option was better. The ability to disable the feature is still not live on, e.g., Xubuntu, and remains undocumented. Anyone searching the internet to disable the feature is sure to land on that page with disappointment, reflecting poorly on Xfce4 as a whole. As the development and release of a critical component of this feature has stagnated, it would be simplest to remove it.
- Trademark and ToS Violations
This feature does not seem to link to Imgur's Terms of Service nor does it abide Imgur's Trademark Use Policy. Therefore, the code is not legal in many jurisdictions and could be challenged, opening the possibility for a lawsuit (e.g. Gaim). As xfce4-screenshooter
is commonly bundled with other software, this potentially puts end users at liability.
- Liability and deletion
If one were to independently determine for themselves and realize they had violated Imgur's policies and attempt to remove their own upload, using the implementation in xfce4-screenshooter
, it would in most cases be either impossible or up to the user to have known in advance they violated a policy which was not provided to them with the software.
- Apparent favoritism
Why is one corporate hosting platform preferred over any other? For fairness, one should provide a large range of options, to the point that the code becomes bloated and unpractical to maintain.
- Violation of UNIX philosophy
A UNIX program should Do One Thing and Do It Well.
Violation of "Doing One Thing": A screen capturing program should screen capture (one thing). It should not anonymously upload files to a proprietary third party website which is unrelated with the software team.
Violation of "Do It Well": The Imgur feature is poorly implemented. There is no confirmation. There is a yet-to-be-adpoted, and yet-to-be-documented feature to disable it. The deletion keys are not logged, and in fact are obscured under a third tab.
- Violation of Free Software Principles
Free Software should not make use of proprietary tools, particularly without the end user first agreeing to their installation on their computers.
- Not Useful to Anyone
Anonymously uploading to Imgur is not a useful feature. Someone who does not use Imgur will have little desire for the feature, and regular Imgur users will have accounts they wish to upload and control their images on the Imgur platform. It looks like a marketing scheme.
- Security and Privacy Concens
It is common these days for QR-codes to be displayed (e.g. WhatsApp web interface authentication) and clear text passwords (e.g., GitHub credentials). Regardless of the examples, the information displayed on a user's screen is implicitly private, and may even contain security-related information. The implementation of the Imgur feature in xfce4-screenshooter
offers very little protections to the end user to prevent errors. A few keystrokes immediately uploads a file to the public internet, and one more keystroke makes removing it essentially an impossibility without contacting Imgur, particularly as this is uploaded anonymously.
- Appears dangerous to users
As there are no safeguards and no ToS provided, if we assume a naive user, this is not only a feature with very few real world benefits, but a danger. Anyone allowing their children to use the computer would be advised to uninstall xfce4-screenshooter
, because an uninformed person may easily make an irrecoverable mistake.
- Should be disabled by default
Given the large array of issues -- some of which are inherent to the feature itself and thus unsolvable -- this feature should be not only disabled at compile time, but also at runtime, by default. The select target audience for this feature need to opt-in, rather than the average user being required to opt-out or compile the software ourselves.
- Conclusion
Just delete this section of the code. It's illegal, dangerous, and pointless.