Hello Mojang,
my name is Razen and I'm the administrator of one of the largest head-databases for Minecraft including 15.000 decoration heads. Today a user came up with a problem - a few of the heads didnt seem to work anymore.
https://minecraft-heads.com/forum/other-suggestions/1098-mislabled-name-tag-inspection?start=5#2219
So I had a closer look at the reported heads - and a lot more: The give-codes looked perfectly ok. I decoded the values within the give-code with base64 and checked the URL - and the URL leads to nothing:
The skins on the servers are used for the image generation, so I know the URL was correct once - but the skin is gone. I validated more skins and according to what I saw, I'm afraid several thousands skins of the whole database are lost. But why? Is there a way to retrieve them? Without the guarantee that Mojang stores the "old skins" of a user as a snapshot on the Mojang-Servers, a database like that would not be possible anymore and the community would lose a lot... so please tell me what happened and how the future of the skins will look like.
Bye
Razen
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https://minecraft-heads.com/dear-mojang
https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/8sw23m/minecraft_texture_skin_deleted/
Linked issues
Comments 7
I have noticed that many heads with textures from skins currently being used by players have also reverted to the default Steve skin on heads already placed in a world. Regenerating the give code for the same player gave a different URL for the skin. For example, the give code I used in the past to get a head with my own skin (Phssthpok), decoded from Base64 contained:
{"textures":{"SKIN":
{"url":"http://textures.minecraft.net/texture/49725d625a50497c6494f33fbb7015446ccad135e93152571e2a57926284053"}
}}but regenerating the give code now returns:
{"textures":{"SKIN":
{"url":"http://textures.minecraft.net/texture/15ed33ea710912d0f90a7a1f0e30e40d421fcd7f962965ac191c7a478f3af0cf"}
}}so it would appear that, rather than the skins having been removed from the database, they have been renumbered
Might be related to skin files containing malicious data.
But also @unknown commented the following 3 years ago:
We have never deleted any skins nor do we have plans to do so in the future.
@Marcono1234: I thought of that, too - but I doubt it. First of all - lots of skins were made by me myself or friends of mine. We wanted to create decoration items, not virus stuff. Secondly - some of those skins which were deleted were very old "snapshots" - it's highly unlikly i those file appears to be a virus out of nowhere. Third - an antivirus-tool should recognize the difference between a normal file and a virus...
About Grums comment: I know those statements, but it's three years ago.Virus, disc space, lots of other stuff could have happened to change his mind...
If you've read this: https://minecraft-heads.com/dear-mojang
(if you didnt read it yet, please do it now) you know I try to retrieve all the lost skins - and we got 96,4% of the lost skins back already. Since the skins from this database are used VERY often within the internet I offer my help in case you need it...
@Marcono1234 or @kumasasa - would it be possible to you to inform a developer or a responsible person so we get an answer quickly here?
We made some changes to the backing storage configuration and didn't take this use case into account.
The skin files should now be available again.
That went a lot quicker than expected - thanks a lot, from me and from all users who uses custom heads!
Indeed 100% of the heads we tested are restored. In other words Dinnerbone's statement about snapshots from skins still counts and this was just a bug, correct?
Update: Actually the textures of 4200 out of 15000 heads are missing... it seems random to me which head is deleted, so I guess its a hard bug...