File:SL Blogger Network on Hiatus.svg: Difference between revisions

Summary

Yearly testing to see if the thumbnail generator already works again.

	Note!
	⭐️⭐️⭐️ Testing SVG uploads since 2012! ⭐️⭐️⭐️

And the answer is: no. The 'out of disk space error' persists after generations of updates, upgrades, and, aye, the odd report on Canny and elsewhere.

Interestingly, the SVG is there. You can retrieve it fully when clicking on the Original File link. In other words, it didn't get rejected. It's just that it's inaccessible, as the thumbnail generation failed due to lack of disk space and/or permissions to access the temporary folder.

Proof?

• Media:SL Blogger Network on Hiatus.svg; or
• https://wiki.secondlife.com/w/img_auth.php/7/73/SL_Blogger_Network_on_Hiatus.svg

To mitigate this, one could upload the thumbnail as a PNG and use the syntax [[File:my-vector-image.svg|border|center|50px|thumb=my-vector-image.png], as in the example below:

(I really should have shrunk it to the default thumbnail size...)

... but this is an ugly hack which defeats the whole purpose of SVGs, i.e., having redimensionable images without loss of quality which are tiny in size (and, optionally, animated and interactive...).

What could be done, then?

Clearly, the cryptic error is not a simple fix, at least not for those Lindens without a background in system administration. If it were, one might assume that, after 14+ years, some patch, upgrade, or reboot would have had some effect.

Therefore, what LL could do, since they (at the time of writing) have upgraded to a sufficiently recent version of MediaWiki, is to have a look at their configuration file and set $wgSVGNativeRendering = true.

This bypasses the whole thumbnail-generating magick (aye, with a k, since it's done by the ImageMagick library 😅) and lets HTML5-compliant browsers simply render SVG directly at whatever size they wish.

Since 98% of the web browsers back in 2023 already supported direct, native SVG rendering, it makes no sense to insist on converting them to thumbnails any more — making them also much faster to render at any size (also see more MediaWiki configuration tips regarding SVG support).

Remember, MediaWiki was developed at the time that rendering PNGs as images were a novelty... you just had GIFs and  X Bitmaps (the latter of which nobody uses any longer). SVG, a quarter of a century old, is a 'novelty' from the perspective of the MediaWiki programmers, who said, 'Yeah, yeah, people are talking about this weird vector format for the Web since 1998, and, guess what, the only format that real browsers support is animated GIFs...'