From an angry webmaster: Quit hotlinking images!

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Iron Clad Burrito

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It's a rant, tl:dr at the bottom.

I'm not an OCD webmaster. I do check my logs occasionally, just to see how the flow of traffic is going. So last night I'm looking, and I had more traffic in December than I ever had... whoa. And to top it off, there was half as much traffic in the 2 days in January than there was all of december. WTH?

I started digging through the logs to see what had captivated the internet so... and I found this image:
olafmetal.jpg


"Olaf, metal!"

Some dumbass hotlinked this picture as his avatar in a metal forum. So far this month (being 12:01 1 Jan 2008 onward), there's been some 7000 pictures served. And to make matters more interesting, I found the image had been hotlinked into an IGN forum thread, a myspace page, and some French forum that presumably talks about metal. Or Kevin Smith. I haven't figured it out yet.

I am not fond of such behavior. I host images and post them on the intarwebs, true. I pay for said hosting and posting, and as such I do believe I should have a modicum of control over where they appear.

Now, last time someone did that, it was two xanga users who had hotlinked my baby's ultrasound pics, posted so my distant family could see them. Said Xanga users, who were apparently doing an online cosplay of Harry Potter characters dealing with teen pregnancy, awakened one morning to find genital warts in place of "Hermione's baby."

This time... I was nicer...

miniasshole01.jpg


Then I decided I wouldn't be SUCH an asshole, and modified the image...

miniasshole02.jpg


Anyway, enough ranting and whining. Webmasters, I ask you. Did I end up being too nice? Or should I have just quietly shut things off (via htaccess, or hotlink protections in cPanel)? Or should I have taken a choice goatse pic and put it in there instead?

(and before any of you smartasses get any ideas, these images were uploaded to a free image hosting service. So take em, I don't care.) :)
 
[quote name='Iron Clad Burrito']Anyway, enough ranting and whining. Webmasters, I ask you. Did I end up being too nice? Or should I have just quietly shut things off (via htaccess, or hotlink protections in cPanel)? Or should I have taken a choice goatse pic and put it in there instead?

(and before any of you smartasses get any ideas, these images were uploaded to a free image hosting service. So take em, I don't care.) :)[/QUOTE]
Goatse is standard procedure around here.
 
Simmilar things would happen for my band back in the day. I'd make flyers and put them up on our site and then every other band on the flyer and random people would hotlink it to their page and post 2139402349823 myspace bulletins using it, effectively using up all our bandwidth.

I wouldn't go so far as the goatse thing myself as I actually somewhat liked these other bands and all everyone was doing was helping promote our shows, but it was still annoying that they could just right click the image and save it on their photobucket pages or something.
 
[quote name='Dead of Knight']Goatse is your only option.[/quote]

I agree, but we're all evil around here.

And I know better than to hotlink, that's what ImageShack is for.
 
Be careful with the swapping of pictures. I remember there being an uproar over a website that had some pictures hotlinked by a soccer mom. The operator of the site then swapped the pictures with some man-on-man porn. While the pictures were no longer visible anywhere on the original author's site, the soccer mom complained to the company who hosted the original site. Turns out, the host of the original site has in their ToS that you cannot have pornographic images hosted on their service. The soccer mom ended up getting this person's site shut down for awhile and they had to go through heck to get their site information off the old servers and loaded onto a new company's server.
 
[quote name='UncleBob']Be careful with the swapping of pictures. I remember there being an uproar over a website that had some pictures hotlinked by a soccer mom. The operator of the site then swapped the pictures with some man-on-man porn. While the pictures were no longer visible anywhere on the original author's site, the soccer mom complained to the company who hosted the original site. Turns out, the host of the original site has in their ToS that you cannot have pornographic images hosted on their service. The soccer mom ended up getting this person's site shut down for awhile and they had to go through heck to get their site information off the old servers and loaded onto a new company's server.[/QUOTE]

Second'd, sounds like more trouble than you want at the moment.
 
[quote name='Snake2715']This could be pretty entertaining... dont leave us hanging here. Did you hear back from them?[/quote]

Ahh, reality's never so exciting as all that. The myspace hotlinker had already ditched the image before I posted here... about 4 hours after my post, the forum avatar bozo found someone to host the image. I wasn't contacted, but frankly I don't care.

And now that that's done, yes, Will, I am enabling hotlink protections; I'm just trying to remember all the exceptions I need to have (CAG, etc).
 
Question. How does one put the message you posted in the pictures that the other users hotlinked? Hope someone points me in the right direction.
 
[quote name='UncleBob']Be careful with the swapping of pictures. I remember there being an uproar over a website that had some pictures hotlinked by a soccer mom. The operator of the site then swapped the pictures with some man-on-man porn. While the pictures were no longer visible anywhere on the original author's site, the soccer mom complained to the company who hosted the original site. Turns out, the host of the original site has in their ToS that you cannot have pornographic images hosted on their service. The soccer mom ended up getting this person's site shut down for awhile and they had to go through heck to get their site information off the old servers and loaded onto a new company's server.[/QUOTE]

Sounds like it's totally worth it.

But just disable the hotlinking. It makes the hotlinked images show up as red Xes or something.
 
[quote name='Bathory']Question. How does one put the message you posted in the pictures that the other users hotlinked? Hope someone points me in the right direction.[/quote]

Simply: Make a new pic with the messages, give it the same name as the hotlinked pic... and upload the replacement pic.
 
My favorite thing is when webmasters do an alternate image and it ends up being a larger file than the one being leeched.
 
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