HA! Sweet (minor) revenge against the hotlinkers (stealing my site's graphics)!

The BBQ Pit
1

Some of you may remember my many battles with hotlinkers and bandwidth thieves, who keep displaying my graphics on their own sites, sucking up my bandwidth.

Well, at least on one of my sites it’s not going to happen anymore. I have several others that are still vulnerable to hotlinkers, but the stuff on those sites isn’t quite so attractive to bloggers and other hotlinking types so it’s not such a pressing issue. (But it’s still an issue to a smaller extent and I’m looking into ways to deal with it.)

I had a whole lot of hotlinkers (bandwidth thieves) linking to the graphics on this one site in particular. I didn’t know how many. I tried to stop them when I could, but there were so many I knew I couldn’t catch them all. So I finally bit the bullet and switched this site to a Linux-hosted site that has a control panel (CPanel) that makes it easy to stop hotlinking. (I know that supposedly I can edit my .htaccess file too (?) but I’m inept and I like the CPanel way better.)

Anyway, I am having any hotlinked file be exchanged with a small graphic that states that the graphic is stolen and the person who is displaying it is a bandwidth thief. Small revenge, but sweet. In other words, any “stolen” graphic is now going to be replaced with a graphic that says that the hotlinker is a thief.

In my site’s web stat reports I can already see the aftermath—a whole lot of blogs, message boards, other sources are referring to my “thief” graphic. Over and over again. Graphics that I never knew anyone wanted to steal were being stolen. Over and over again. Well, not any more! HA!

It’s going to take a few days for the site to fully “propigate” (make the transition) over to the new servers, so not all the hotlinkers know what has been going on—that the avatar image or sig file image or nifty picture they’d put in their blog is now suddenly going to turn into a little admonishing graphic telling everyone that they’ve been selfish and naughty.

HA! It is a safisfying feeling. All the messages and disclaimers on my site telling people to NOT take my graphics or display them were ignored. Perhaps this will finally get their attention.

HA! :stuck_out_tongue:

2

I have no doubt said this before but you do good work. I can see why folks would steal it.

3

Good job. I still think you should make it a hardcore porn graphic, maybe tubgirl or goatse.

4

Someone hotlinked to one of Mr Cazzle’s images from their online auction. He replaced the image with one of a great steaming turd (you can find a photo of anything on the internet!). The Bandwidth Thief didn’t notice, and kept relisting his auction with the turd photo! Hilarious. The item in question never sold. Eventually Mr Cazzle was feeling cheeky and emailed him to say “That item looks like a piece of shit”, but BT still didn’t catch on. Ahh, memories!

5

Nah. Find a large animated .gif of two dogs fucking, and have the words “BANDWIDTH THIEF” blink on and off in bright yellow letters.

6

It should be noted that if one does a Google image search on “steaming turd”*, one of the images that appears is the cover of Pat Boone’s “In A Metal Mood” album.

You know, the one featuring his classic rendition of “Stairway To Heaven”.
I’m not sure of the reason for this, but the logic is impeccable.

*yes, one needs to find better things to do with one’s time.

7

My friend hosts the Official Model Warship Combat site from his home, and if you leech one of his images, he will replace it with goatse. Or tubgirl. Or penisbird.

The most humorous occasion was when some 1am3r d00d used an image from mwci.org as a tiled background for his personal blog that his entire high school apparently viewed daily. The blog allowed visitors to leave comments.

:wally

8

Yep. That’s exactly what I did.

I have a question, isn’t copying any of the disgusting pictures that have been mentioned in this thread a violation of copyright in itself. Sure whoever did those pictures deserve a beating with a cactus, but *not * having his copyright infringed. That would be just bad. :wink:

9

Do you allow any concession whatsoever for the occasional person who has a low-traffic page with a reference to one of your graphics because he thinks it’s neat? That hardly seems like cause for needing sweet, sweet revenge and calling him a thief. Not saying it’s not a problem, but certainly everyone who hotlinks is not a complete bastard deserving of your undying scorn…

I just thought of a feature for anti-hotlinking software – it could allow up to N accesses per time period from a particular referrer, or up to X mb of traffic referred by a particular site, before switching to the “thief” picture.

10

I’d never heard of penisbird, so i did a search. That’s pretty funny.

11

But there’s no need to hotlink it - they can copy the picture and host it themselves. That’s still theft, but it doesn’t suck up yosemite’s bandwidth (and cost her money too, depending on her hosting).

It’s bad enough that people are stealing her images; why should she have to pay a penalty for it as well?

The people who know it’s wrong won’t be deterred from hotlinking in future, even if they have to remove this picture. But those who didn’t realise it’s a stupid thing to do will now know that it’s got consequences and is frowned upon.

12

Sorry I was so late returning back to this thread, I was enamoured with my new site stats, which are way better than the old host’s stats!

dropzone, thanks for the kind words about my work. Bless your heart. I don’t know why some people steal some of my work—I think they just grab the first picture that fits whatever they are looking for, and my stuff often comes up first in searches. (I got a book on how to get listed high in the search engines, and it did help!)

cazzle, what your husband did was a thing of beauty. :slight_smile: bughunter, I like the way your friend thinks!

mhendo, Jackmannii, I don’t really want to replace the graphic with anything too gross. I do realize that a lot of the people are clueless. Also, I don’t want such a graphic even on my site at all. (The new web host is pretty strict about “objectionable material” and something that was in the porn category would most assuredly get me booted off.) But it is a deliciously evil idea. :wink:

Mighty_Girl, I remember your recent run-in with the bandwidth and copyright thieves. In fact, when you mentioned that you were able to “turn off” hotlinking in your Control Panel, a light went off inside my head. “Such a thing is possible?” I thought. And so when I was hunting around for a host and found one that had this feature, I went for it. So in a way, you are responsible for all of this! :slight_smile:

Well, stringy put it pretty well, but I’ll elaborate a little further.

The “sweet revenge” is just that. I’m sick of these people. I do have notices on every page saying that the content from my site is not to be published anywhere else. I doubt these people pay attention to that (they sure don’t on another site of mine, where I’ve resorted to using big red bold letters), but that’s not my problem. I did put all those notices up there for a reason. And I think “thief” accurately describes what they do. They need a wake-up call.

Plus, the “revenge” is in the form of a little graphic that says that they steal bandwidth and are showing a stolen graphic. Embarrassing for them? Sure, but not terribly severe. I cannot feel any sympathy. They need to learn, sooner or later. I realize that there will be a few people who meant well that are going to get their images replaced with the admonishing graphic, but there’s not much I can do about that. They’ll survive.

The new host is more strict about bandwidth usage than the old host. True, I doubt I’ll exceed it (I live in fear of exceeding my bandwidth allottment so I chose a host that allowed me plenty extra), but if for some reason there is a bandwidth spike someday, I will need every bit of the bandwidth allowed to me for legitimate use. I cannot afford any extra for these little blogging leeches.

13

IIRC, Penisbird is the unofficial official picture to put up in place of the hotlinked image order to notify leeches that they’re not appreciated.

14

I stand corrected. Keep up the good fight against hot-linkers (bandwidth thieves). Eventually, you will prevail against people who embed your images in their web pages (netmurderers). The use of images from other peoples’ sites (cyber-rape) will be a thing of the past.

15

(For what it’s worth, I’m just giving you a hard time about your extreme terminology. I once replaced a hotlinked image with a file that said “I am a huge rectum. Ridicule me.” but that was for a good friend’s site. Fair game. :slight_smile: )

16

I’m not mean enough to do the following, but I’m mean enough to laugh my butt off about it.

Some girl was stealing a friend’s image for her site background. He emailed her and she was unrepentant. So he grabbed her photo off the site, photoshopped it onto a naked body and replaced the image in his site. Her visitor log was quite amusing for a few hours. She even posted a huffy reply in response to being “Attacked”.

17

:rolleyes:

Look. If I end up having to pay extra for bandwidth because of a bunch of people leeching images for their blogs and whatnot, what is that? What are those people doing? They are using my resources—my bandwidth—for themselves. And I end up having to pay extra for it. That’s stealing.

Just in case you think it’s just me that thinks this way, check out a few other sites:

Web Site Parasites.

Outwit the Bandwidth thieves.

Smarter Image Hotlinking Prevention.

Stubborn Bandwidth Thieves (about halfway down the page).

And it goes on and on. A lot of us feel this way, and a lot of us use the word “thieves” to describe what these parasites and leeches do.

18

Oh for fuck’s sake. When you put files on a web site, they’re free for the taking unless you take specific measures against it, and downloading or linking to the files is not “stealing” any more than it is “stealing” your bandwidth to hit “reload” a lot while looking at your page. I’m sorry to break the news to you, but there is no crime or unethical behavior there, and if you want it to stop, you have to figure out a way to put a stop to it from your own end (which you have now done). But calling these people “thieves” is fucking stupid and makes you sound like you don’t understand the technology.

19

Well, all I can do is refer to the links I gave above. And there are a jillion more like them. Hotlinking is reviled by webmasters everywhere and it is considered stealing.

But hey, if you are so grievously offended by the word “thief,” let’s go with “parasite” or “leech.” They’ll work just as well in my book, and I believe are quite accurate in describing what these people do.

20

This obsession you have with “leeches” stealing your life essence is going a bit overboard.

Oh, sorry. I copied some of your words to use in this post. What address should I send the 5 cent royalty check to? I don’t want to be another “leech”. :rolleyes: