From the title, this looks like it could be a pretty clueless or confused OP, but I don’t think it will be. Hear me out.
I have a family blog on which I, my sister, and my parents put text and pictures up of our family. I regularly look at the referrers to see if anyone is linking to the site. I’ve found some interesting links, but a little while ago I found a website called damagedtwinkles is linking to a particular picture from one of it’s forums, from several threads in the forum. The picture is of an innocent kiss between my nephew and his cousin of the same age.
The name of the site sounds like a child pornography site. But I don’t know for sure. One thing I do know is that people are regularly arrested for having child pornography on their computer, and I wouldn’t want to have to go to the forum, perhaps even register, to see what exactly is going on, all the while taking a risk in polluting my cache with pictures I do not want. I can empty the cache of course, but the picture would still exist on the physical drive. Also, it’s possible that the FBI monitors connections to this server. Basically, I don’t want to go find out, and I think it pays to be paranoid about this sort of thing.
If it is a child pornography site, I wonder if I should even do anything. I certainly don’t want to tell my family because it would freak them out, and I wouldn’t want to do that unless there is a threat, and I really don’t think there is any.
I suppose I could just remove the picture in question. But what really would be the point of that?
So I’m kind of wondering is I’m freaking out over nothing, or perhaps not freaking out enough over something dangerous.
It’s quite possibly people linking to the picture for undesirable reasons - but they may not be doing anything illegal.
The only options to avoid this are firstly to remove the picture from its current location. Secondly, call it something like pic002.jpg, rather than john_kisses_james.jpg, to deflect purient interest.
Thirdly, you can have some fun. Take a picture of a dog-turd, or similar, and post it with the name of the original picture. Then, whoever is hotlinking to it gets the replaced picture, until the realise what’s going on.
I have an up-close, disgusting picture of a bird turd that landed on the table where I was drinking coffee one day. I’d be glad to e-mail it to you for this purpose.
I bit the bullet and went over to their forums for you.
There is a forum called “Leather” that is devoted to sex talk, but a cursory glance didn’t bring up any sort of kiddie porn.
It’s actually fairly sized, with 131 members, 4,657 threads, and 62,500 posts. A kiddie porn operation that large would be busted in a heartbeat, especially one that’s as open as a message board. I think that they just thought the picture was cute, or maybe it’s part of someone’s sig since they have HTML enabled.
I wouldn’t worry about it, or if you’re still worried, just do what GorillaMan said and change the URL on the picture.
Having not seen the picture you are talking about, and assuming it is just an innocent shot of two, fully clothed (male?) kids kissing, it could be that people simply find it cute. Think about it…you can go to any Hallmark store and buy a greeting card with a little boy and girl kissing, and send that to Ms. Robyn on your anniversary.
However, Gay men do not have a large selection so maybe people are using the link, printing it out and sending it to their SO’s in the form of a cute greeting card.
(Forgive me if the shot was indeed boy/girl, but GorillaMan seemed to imply it was boy/boy.)
Just a thought.
But if you are truly freaked out by it, I agree the best bet is to simply change the name of the photo and move it elsewhere on the site.
No problem. I’ve seen all kinds of things on the 'Net because I usually have to see for myself. In this case it turned out to be no big deal, but that’s not always the case, believe me.
People…PEOPLE…if you suspect someone is engaged in child pornography, and especially if you suspect he’s linking your relatives to it, notify the police. They all have kiddie porn task forces (or are able to get to one). If you’re wrong, no harm is done. If you’re right, you’ve saved lots of kids from lots of bad shit.