Card #2173 · Discourse Meta
Custom emojis and chat thumbnails bypass CDN when using S3/R2 storage
When using S3 or Cloudflare R2 for uploads with a custom CDN, custom emojis and chat thumbnails bypass the CDN and load directly from the raw bucket URL. This results in broken images for secure buckets and causes unexpected S3 egress fees for others.
Pain score
0.57/ 1.00 · weighted product of four components
Reach0.32distinct authors (log-normalized)
Recency0.99freshness decay, half-life months
Engagement0.65upvotes + comments, normalized
Monetization1.00willingness-to-pay cues in evidence
§ Evidence — 4 verified quotes
custom emoji uploads do not respect the CDN configuration and attempt to load directly from the raw bucket URL
when an external S3 or compatible object storage is configured for uploads, chat thumbnail images bypass the CDN and are loaded directly from the bucket URL
for S3-compatible storage like Cloudflare R2 that are secure-by-default and block unauthenticated access to raw bucket endpoints, chat thumbnail images (optimized) are broken
bandwidth leaks for AWS and other S3-compatible object storage buckets that allow access to raw bucket endpoints, since chat is bypassing the CDN entirely; this results in paying direct S3 egress fees for all chat thumbnail traffic
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