Omploader

Omploader

URL	http://ompldr.org/
Commercial?	No
Type of site	File Hosting Service
Registration	Anonymous
Available language(s)	English
Created by	Brenden Matthews
Launched	January 2006, re-launched August 2007
Alexa rank	119,842 (October 2011)[1]
Current status	Active

Omploader is an online file hosting service founded by Brenden Matthews. It offers free file hosting with a focus on image hosting in particular. Omploader is funded solely by donations from users and does not contain advertisements.^[2] The website's source code is available under the GNU General Public License.^[3]

History

Omploader was initially a simple PHP script with less than 100 lines of code written by David Shakaryan^[4]. In 2007, Brenden Matthews rewrote Omploader in Ruby as a hobby using basic CGI, MySQL, memcached, and various 3rd party libraries.^[5]

In 2010, Omploader switched from using omploader.org as its primary domain name to ompldr.org. However, both domains still work.

Features

Omploader's policy on content is laissez-faire. There is a file size limit of 1GiB, files do not expire, and there are generally no restrictions on content as long is it is neither abusive nor illegal, and as long as it does not create excessive server load.^[5] The main page algorithmically displays the 5 most popular recently added files and images.

Omploader features information pages for each file that allow users to comment anonymously and see file statistics. Inline linking is allowed, but has been known to redirect images to an offensive image when accessed from websites that have been blacklisted after failing to comply with the website's terms of service.^[6]

Omploader's URLs are designed to be short and obfuscated, while allowing people to mask the original filename, or spoof the filename by simply modifying the URL. The URLs follow a pattern of '/v[ID]' to view, '/i[ID]' for info, and '/t[ID]' for thumbnails. The view URL can be appended with a '/' followed by an arbitrary string, allowing one to further obfuscate the URLs. For example, http://ompldr.org/vABC123/ and http://ompldr.org/vABC123/file.jpg would return the same response from the server.

Extensions

In addition to the web-based interface, third-party tools have been developed to access Omploader. There is a Firefox extension^[5], a Google Chrome Extension^[5], and a Ruby script for uploading files from the Command-line interface.^[5]

Popularity

Omploader has a statistics page that provides a brief set of usage statistics.

References

1. ^ "omploader.org Site Info". Alexa Internet, Inc. http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/omploader.org. Retrieved 27 October 2011. 
2. ^ Donations page
3. ^ Git repository
4. ^ Omploader in 2006
5. ^ ^{a b c d e} "Omploader FAQ". http://ompldr.org/about.html. 
6. ^ "rewrites.txt". http://ompldr.org/rewrites.txt. 

External links

• Omploader home page
• Omploader FAQ