Hello,
While cruising the net I come upon another message board. I see that one of the members is using the Dope’s “Fighting Ignorance Since 1973 (It’s Taking Longer Than We Thought!)” red banner, hotlinking to it. I was wondering who I should be contacting about this, assuming you guys care.
I should think they’d know about it, since hotlinks will show up in the server logs. Then again, those logs are probably freaking HUGE on this board. Not speaking for the Board or The Reader, but I’d email Ed Zotti and Arnold Winkelreid and let them do with it what they wish. More than the bandwith issue, there’s also likely a copyright violation here.
If it’s what I think it is, we don’t mind. From http://www.straightdope.com/badges/
Actually, it’s the red banner that’s at the top of all of our screens, right underneath the blue “The Straight Dope” banner. Did you want me to email you the link where I saw it?
I think you’re thinking of jdavis. I doubt very much if Ed or Arnold has ever spent a long weekend scanning the access.log file.
My board is now about 1/12 the size of the SDMB in terms of posts (and about 1/50 in terms of reads) and generates a 100-130MB access.log every 3 weeks. We can probably scale it by about 30-40 times for the SDMB, unless they’re done something like made a custom log that doesn’t record board graphics hits (like I did). That would shrink the size down by about 75% from my experience. 
Is it not preferred that a user wishing to link to TSD save the banner, then upload it to their own space, so as to reduce the load on the server? (As opposed to sending the browser to the TSD site to get the banner every time.)
Then again, it is a promotional banner, and it does link to TSD, so maybe it’s an acceptable “steal” of bandwidth.
So do I. Did I say differently? 
[QUOTE=Troy McClure SF]
Is it not preferred that a user wishing to link to TSD save the banner, then upload it to their own space, so as to reduce the load on the server?
[QUOTE]
Yes.
From the page Link To Us
HOW TO USE THE BADGES
The following directions are for Windows or MacOS and should cover most of the browsers out there. If you’re smart enough to be using unix, you should be smart enough to figure out how to do this on your own.
Hold your mouse over the graphic you want to use and:
[Windows] Click on the right mouse button.
[MacOS] Click and hold down the mouse button.
Select “Download Image to Disk” from the menu that pops up.
Make a note of the file name (for example, “straightdope.gif”) and where you saved it.
Upload the file to your own web server.
Include the following HTML in the web page in which you want to include the badge:
<A HREF=“http://www.straightdope.com/”><IMG SRC=“straightdope.gif”></A>
[/quote
[ please ignore the typos above. Every time I tried to preview it complained that “your message is too short, it must be at least 2 letters”. Another bug for the pile. ]
The software doesn’t count characters in
[QUOTE]
tags. It’s not a bug, it’s a “feature”. 
No. On second reading, it appears I misread and/or misinterpreted what you were saying. My mistake.
I thought it was something like that. No biggie, anyway.
BTW, don’t they have automated log parsers or something that can look for this sort of thing? It shouldn’t be all that tough to script out, and run it as a CRON job.
:smack: Ah. not what I was thinking at all. Someday I’ll wonk on that reading comprehension thing.
I’m sure this is not the sort of thing we want to encourage, but I’m not sure exactly what our policy is. I’ll pass it on to a higher power.
I guess my writing could stand some wonk too.
[QUOTE=Q.E.D.]
The software doesn’t count characters in
The software also doesn’t count any characters enclosed in brackets, regardless of whether they are interpreted as VBCode or not. That bit is definitely a bug.
…and I immediately notice that it screws up partially-nested quote tags too.
[Testing the premise of the prvious post]
Whaddaya know? It wouldn’t let me post the above. Yep, that’s a bug alright. If you haven’t already, you should post that to the Bug Reports thread.
I will pass on these, um, comments to our techs, who have had much to say grace over the last little while.
No promises on when the problems will be fixed, but they’re doing their best.
As for Mr. “It’s okay to link, it’s only a little banner,” we’re contemplating asking him nicely to cease and desist or changing the call so it says something more appropriate instead; a comment on their lineage, perhaps, or their predilections. None of the current candidates for replacement can be printed in this forum, so we’re taking this under advisement.
We do provide banners and bugs you can use on your own site, but this is not what we had in mind, no.
Your patience and consideration is appreciated.
your humble Tuba Diva
Administrator
I’m sure your tech people already know this, but there are things they can do to stop hotlinking of images. I can’t go into details because I know nothing about your particular server setup but, if they don’t know how to stop it, there’s plenty of info available just by Googling “hotlinking”.