I caught an image/bandwidth thief.
This guy was linking to my site directly and was using my image of a picture from my Starbucks Doubleshot Review as his image the this L33T forum he reads. So every time he posted something and every time someone read a topic he posted to it hit MY server.
This is capital L Lame so I did a Google search for images of poop and created this little image to swap out. I mean I do read my refferal logs and I can tell when people are blatantly linking to my images and stealing my bandwidth.
I could have been really mean and linked to some really nasty shit but I thought I would let him off light. I would have emailed him but there is no email address for him and I didn't feel like joining the forum
I mean he can use my image as long as he posts it to his own damn server.
Anyhoo this has been fun.
Before
After
Note: Yes I know I spelled Thief wrong
Hee!
I love my server's hotlink protection, though I did use an image of Keanu giving the finger as a replacement image for a while.
Well if you are trying to offer linking banners blocking Hotlinking would be a pain but I like watching out for hotlinked stuff. It was really shocking to se an image I took with my digital camera being used. I mean it is a shot of my Mouse on my desk and in the background is my Dreamcast to PC VGA box.
Did you mean to misspell bandwidth too?
Gee thanks MOM. I was at work and didn't have alot of time to do this.
lol - that's to funny.
If I were your mom I'd make you repeat the third grade.
Said the man with no URL of their own and a YAHOO email account
Hey, guy-who-owns-this-site, this is the bandwidth thief. Since I'm an overcaffeinated coffee maniac, a friend of mine suggested I link to your particularly-appropriate image. I'm just going to have a friend host the image for me. Didn't mean to be a leech, so I'll de-link the thing.. (Although, I never got to see the replaced icon.. for some reason, by the time the same friend told me about it, it had switched back to the coffee logo.. odd.. and the one here shows as a broken link for me.) I didn't know there was film in that camera in that hat! I was unaware! UNAWARE! (Bonus to anyone who can ID that reference.)
-Bullets "Wanted For Grand Theft Bandwidth" Go There
Well you are free to use the image but if you would copy it and put it in a server that you have space on such like or a free hosting space like Yahoo, Geocities, Blogspot or MSN and link to that. It isn't that big of a deal but it is a general fact with web designers that Direct linking and embedding of images with out permission is a frowned on thing unless it is an linking banner and is encouraged.
Just found this post. Good "switcheroo". Here is a good site to point people to explaining why hotlinking is bad:
http://altlab.com/hotlinking.html
Thanks I now have an hotlinking script running on my server that blocks dorks from hot linking my images.