I posted a comment with a link to a gif on imgur. When I look at the comment now, the gif is gone, though when I edit the comment, the hyperlink to the gif is still there, and imgur is still serving up the gif. So why isn’t it displaying?
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Good question. That’s happened to me several times.
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Are you linking to the .gif or the weird url thingys imgur presents people by default? I’ve had lots of weirdness with those that direct linking fixes.
yeah I always have to “open image in new tab” and then nick that url that has the file extension.
If I’m not mistaken, when you post the .gif (assuming it’s actually a .gif and not a disguised video of some sort), it is uploaded and cached on BoingBoing’s servers – and if the .gif exceeds a certain size, it disappears.
One way to be sure is to save the .gif locally on your computer and then upload it manually.
Yeah, but I get a little paranoid about what else maybe gets uploaded/accessed from my computer. 
No idea.
I’ll ask support to have a look.
Worry not, at least with Discourse - you’re just uploading the image here. Your browser doesn’t send any more information than what you send by interacting with the site normally.
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It’s a pretty huge gif. I tried uploading it myself, but boingboing will only accept an uploaded file of a certain size. That’s why I uploaded to imgur and then linked to it here.
And as far as I can tell, it’s a normal imgur link: https://i.imgur.com/gfRzXhI.gif
https://imgur.com/gfRzXhI
Instead of
https://imgur.com/gfRzXhI.gif
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To add to what @orenwolf is saying, Discourse is open source, anyone can view the source code and figure out how it works. Everything from how user badges can be granted to how comments are stored is available for perusal. But aside from that, when you hit the “upload” button, the service that opens up a little file manager so you can find the file and which displays image previews is a browser service. That’s Firefox or Chrome managing all of that by communicating with Windows or OSX or Ubuntu or whatever, not Discourse. Discourse only communicates through the browser. Now if FF or Chrome are malicious, well… Discourse would be the least of your concerns on that.
That said, it’s always possible that BoingBoing decided to alter their code to conduct drive-by attacks of people’s systems… but that likely wouldn’t be through Discourse, and people would notice.
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