Issue: Import Images Other Than Attachments

For the first point: If it's still in vB albums and the album permissions are changed, likely you are still in control of the site in this case. In that case, it is intentional to break existing image links by changing the permissions. This would happen whether the links were in VaultWiki or not. If it was the album owner who changed something like privacy, then this is also intentional, because the user doesn't want those images to be seen or used by just anyone.

For the second point: this is more within the scope of VaultWiki. If you originally had a wiki on vBulletin and you also used vBulletin's albums, you would want those albums tranferred in some form if you migrate to a different forum software, whether they are used in the wiki or not. In this case, it is in VaultWiki's interest to provide an importer for albums and appropriate redirect scripts, because VaultWiki has its own gallery/image/attachment system that it thinks should be preferred over other software options.

For the final point: this is not an issue if you use VaultWiki on a forum software that provides a proxy cache for offsite images, such as XenForo. VaultWiki doesn't have its own off-site-image-BB-Code, so the forum's own proxied tag would be used anyway. Even with a proxy cache, though, the entry will eventually expire, and if the off-site image is removed, it will break the image. I don't think there's anything we should do about this. We should expect that, given the choice between VaultWiki's attachments and an off-site hosted image, the user is making an informed decision about what that means for the image's availability. In many cases, the user linking the image has ownership of the original image and may not be comfortable uploading it directly to the wiki.

So for the purposes of this feature request, we will be focusing on your second point, and resolving that situation.

For the first point: its virtually always a case of an album owner changing their general album permission without considering the effect on their wiki contributions. Wiki contributions are public and applying profile permissions to elements of wiki content does not make sense.

In regards to the last point: the admin can simply set the xenforo image proxy in admincp to 0 which means that xenforo will create a copy of all offsite images and host it locally. It basically imports all offsite images.
https://xenforo.com/community/thread...logging.66592/
VW could do with the same function.

Regarding the last point: In 4.1.x, we have added a setting to change the expiry of the wiki's image proxy. This allows for virtually "importing" the images that are proxied (currently used for custom icons pointing to a URL) on vBulletin and XenForo < 1.3 (XenForo's got its own proxy in 1.3), by either setting a far-future expiry or by disabling expiry with a 0 setting.

In 4.1.x, we have expanded the usage of the wiki image proxy to also proxy IMG tags used in wiki pages and comments.

It should be noted that VaultWiki's proxy URLs and storage locations are hashed based on local installation salts. If you move your installation to a different forum software, your proxies are all invalid due to different salts. So if you wanted to maintain your existing infinite-expiry proxy cache after a forum/wiki migration without refreshing the whole cache, we would need to provide an importer option for this.

The migration limitation is also the case for XenForo's image proxy. So if you want to not have to refresh the proxy cache after a forum migration, you would need an importer capable of handling this situation.

Since you are already on XenForo, you are only affected by the XenForo limitation as you are only using XenForo's proxy at this point.

Leaving this open until a vBulletin albums importer is added to VaultWiki, and an importer option and step is added to copy proxied images when importing from another copy of VW4.

This suggestion is 4 years old and dated from way before I migrated to XF. And when I was importing from vb to XF.

I am not using XF image proxy, but metamirror instead. Its a much better approach IMHO as its ads the external attachments to the attachment system. There are two very popular addons that do the same.