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- A week or so ago I found a site I liked. The hit counter was at ~10,500 hits since April 97. Yesterday morning I posted a link on another board I visit, and twenty-four hours later the hit counter is at ~270,000. There’s no way that I can be absolutely sure I caused it all, but the hit counter began climbing within about a half-hour of my posting the link.
So I’m wondering, , ,
- A week or so ago I found a site I liked. The hit counter was at ~10,500 hits since April 97. Yesterday morning I posted a link on another board I visit, and twenty-four hours later the hit counter is at ~270,000. There’s no way that I can be absolutely sure I caused it all, but the hit counter began climbing within about a half-hour of my posting the link.
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- How exactly does one define “stealing bandwidth”? As I understand it, people put stuff on the net to be seen. If I give someone else a link to something that I think is interesting, I don’t know how many other people will visit that site until I see the hit counter going up, and by then it is propagating through e-mail and copying the site’s content onto my own site won’t do any good; yet we’re also not supposed to copy the another site’s contents without permission and I’d suppose lots of people with websites wouldn’t give it. If I’ve got it right, to avoid bandwidth stealing we’d all have to stop giving out net addresses to each other. - MC
I wouldn’t call what you did bandwidth stealing. You provided a link, and others could follow it or not as their inclination took them.
Bandwidth stealing would be where I put up my homepage with a graphic or frame that pulls something from another person’s site. Anytime, my site is viewed, it calls on the other person’s site - using up their bandwidth. It also means that I don’t have to store those files on my server, which saves me space.
OK, this happened to me so I can comment…
I have two web sites I run. I used to have them both on the web space provided by my ISP.
Now, someone apparently liked several of the images on my site and put them on their site. They didn’t copy the .jpegs themselves, they just linked to the images on my site using IMG tags.
The site in question happened to be one of the major internet portals.
Two weeks later my ISP shut down my web site and told me to either stop the traffic or pay them for a commercial site.
You see, every time someone loaded that other site, the .jpegs were copied from my site so that they could be displayed in their browser. The files were being copied off their servers and through their network and resulted in over 200 megabytes of data being transfered from my web site in two weeks.
If the traffic had continued, they would have started charging me $58 for every 100 megabytes that were transferred.
So, what is meant by bandwidth stealing is when you link to an element of another persons site in order to display it as part of your site. Since the viewer is seeing your site and sees the element as part of your site, you have “stolen” the bandwith used for transferring that element from its owner.
If you simply provide a link to another site and the viewer follows the link and then sees the other person’s site, then this is not bandwidth stealing since the viewer is seeing the site as intended (and presumably the owner put the site up so that it could be seen.)
Hope this makes sense.
“Sometimes I think the web is just a big plot to keep people like me away from normal society.” — Dilbert
{{{So, what is meant by bandwidth stealing is when you link to an element of another persons site in order to display it as part of your site. Since the viewer is seeing your site and sees the element as part of your site, you have “stolen” the bandwith used for transferring that element from its owner.}}}—tanstaafl
As well, the loose consensus has been reached that, deep linking is also considered to be bandwidth stealing. It’s a bit of a stretch in my estimation, but I do see what’s being said as having some merit.
A good way of combating this is to bury your element files in a sub-directory, modify your content links appropriately, and disallow deep linking (There are a number of ways to accomplish this, depending on web server software).
–Kalél
TheHungerSite.com
“If our lives are indeed the sum-total of the choices we’ve made, then we cannot change who we are; but with every new choice we’re given, we can change who we’re going to be.”
tanstaafl-
When this happens, change your site to use a new image name, and change the old image name to point to something else.
For example, if your site refers to images/foo.gif and someone else starts using it, copy foo.gif to foo2.gif, change all your files that reference it to use foo2.gif, then change foo.gif to be something the thief wouldn’t want to have on his web site. Porn would be a bad idea, but a nice big image saying “Joe Blow is a big fat jerk” would work nicely. If you make it a simple enough image, the size might be considerably smaller and you’d save bandwidth, plus jerky boy would stop.
An alternative if you have control of the server is to refuse to serve images if the ‘referrer’ of the image is not on your site. This way no one can refer to images on your page as they’ll just get broken images.
Finally, you could do the above copying/renaming of the image and then remove the original, leaving a broken image for the jerk and saving yourself bandwidth.
An ISP that is complaining about bandwidth usage should understand the theft issue and work with you to stop it - i.e. they could do the ‘refuse to serve images referred to by other sites’ trick.
::This is a test post. Please ignore it::
::If you see multiposts above, please ignore them, too. I’ll clean them up::
There are a couple of really nice CGI programs that do this. Of course, some are a real PITA if you already have a working site, especially if it’s image heavy, since you can’t just do a find/replace to change the code on the images. You end up having to change path, extension, all sorts of details – but no one but your server or servers you designate will be able to pull up the images.
I have read (either on their site or someone else’s as an example) about a couple of people who does this, using an images that read “I steal bandwidth” and “I am a bandwidth thief”.
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- Actually I think porn is a great idea, but then, I always think that. Maybe something like:
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“I like young boys as secret friends. If you are a young boy about ten years old or less, e-mail me and tell me your name, address and phone number and I can give you money and trips to visit me if you are near my area.”
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- I’m still not quite clear on this; why would the ISP care if an image from your site gets sent a million times, or your web page gets hit a million times? All the transfers would still be taking up bandwidth, wouldn’t they? Referring to the site address I gave out: is the guy who owns it going to get charged extra by his net provider, just because he got so many hits? - MC
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Here’s a question I posted in a similar thread in ATMB, Uh, Tuba, About bandwidth stealing, but didn’t get any answers. Maybe you all would like to comment:
Well?
TT
“It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.”
–James Thurber
If you encourage the use of your graphic, most people will probably just copy it and use it on their web page.
Otherwise, in my book any time you do something deceptive for profit you are a ‘bad guy’. If you promise someone item ‘A’, then for your own profit (and their detriment) change it to item ‘B’ surreptitously, you’re a swine.
Finally, anyone with a serious web site who would trust a major piece of their content to a link and server they have no control over is making a serious error in judgement.
Ok, “Amalgamated Junk” posts a link to an informational site about “junk.” Following that link takes you to a site that explains “junk” in minute detail BUT the new site pops up under the “Amalgamated Junk” headers. The new site appears to be part and parcel of the “Amalgamated Junk” site. Is this considered bandwidth stealing?
Is it even legal? Ethical?
Crystalguy
Yes, the charge would apply even if the owner’s site got the hits. The differance is that if the owner’s site is getting hit, at least the owner is having their page seen and they are getting whatever benefit they intended by setting up the site. When someone else links to the images then the owner still gets hit by the traffic but gets none of the benefit of the traffic.
I am told that Geocities, Tripod and the other “free webspace communities” are starting to do this since enough people are using them just as a storage space for images.
No problems here since you “encouraged everybody” to link to your image. Problems only occur when someone makes the link without notifying you or asking permission.
“Sometimes I think the web is just a big plot to keep people like me away from normal society.” — Dilbert
Judge rules that deep-linking is ok
Well, now it’s officially ok to do this, as long as you’re acting in good faith and not trying to deceive people.
There is one safeguard known generally to the wise, which is an advantage and security to all,
but especially to democracies as against despots. What is it? Distrust.
– Demosthenes
Joe Cool
For some ISPs, no it won’t matter whether the bandwidth is from hits or image transfers. In these cases, though, it still matters to the website owner/creator, as tanstaafl stated, because if the bandwidth use is from hits, that means the page is being viewed (and, for commercials site, perhaps being used for purchases/for non-commercial sites, perhaps enjoyed).
But what about free website providers? Well, first of all, again the website is not being used for what it was created for–for people to read and enjoy it. But also the free website providers have these things called ads, which they use to make a profit. No page views = no ad views = no revenue for the bandwidth being used. Enough no revenue may = bye, bye free website providers.
And as for the argument that the images will inspire people to look at the site, how many websurfers are there who will check out the site vs. the number who will just think “Cool image” and perhaps write down the image URL to put up again and again and again?