Okay, That’s It
That’s it indeed. First free moment I get, I am putting in a block script in my image directory to keep Google’s image bot out. I’ve had it up to here.
When you have a blog with images, you stand the risk of being swamped by hotlinkers. Sometimes I take some nice shots, and I want to share them. But what happens is that some rather impolite person will find that image via Google, and without permission, without a link back to my site, without even visiting my site at all, they simply grab the address of the image and hotlink.
I have described before what hotlinking is. In short, instead of using an image that they store on their own site, they “link” to the image residing on my site; despite being an image on my site, it appears seamlessly to be a part of theirs. The problem: I get charged for the bandwidth it eats up.
Normally, it’s not a huge issue; usually, it’s a small image and is only accessed a few dozen times. That’s a pinprick; I would hardly notice it. A lot of times, people hotlink the images for use on forums or MySpace accounts; those are the worst offenders. But once in a while, someone with a high-bandwidth site decides to take a large image from yours and hotlink to it. That’s what happened here.
Someone in Ohio who runs a web site that talks a lot about “how to increase your site traffic” and boasts of their AdSense revenue took a 1280-pixel-wide image from my site, a photo of lightning I took a while back. They then used that image–badly, at that–as the background for the title header on their blog, so that it appeared on every single last page of their own blog.
In just the past 9 days, the image was hotlinked at least 17,792 times… meaning that in just over a week, this one person ate up almost four gigabytes of my bandwidth, or about 20% of the total bandwidth of my site for that period of time.
I would not have been quite as ticked off had this person innocently hotlinked without understanding… but the content of their site, one comment in particular, told me that they knew exactly what hotlinking was. Worse, this person quotes scripture on their main page.
So I substituted the image with a smaller version that contained a text message detailing my annoyance (no obscenities), and left an acerbic comment… but really, this is the last straw.
As I mentioned above, the first chance I get, I am cleaning house. I will leave a robots.txt file to steer Google Images (and whatever other image bots I can identify) away from my images directory. I am then going to clear out every file more than 100 KB–even smaller ones, if there are not too many. I might replace them with smaller/more compressed images, but that could mean too much work. In the future, I will post larger images, but I will yank them within a few weeks or months.
This is disappointing to me. I like sharing the photos I take, I want people to enjoy them. But when even a few bad apples take advantage of that and run hog-wild over my site resources…
It is just too much frakking trouble.
You might want to try a gallery program. I’ve noticed the images I post in (my site address)/gallery never come up in search engines.
I think you showed great reserve Luis – I’d have really put something… different… as the image!
Probably spouting something you already know – but have you considered places like photobucket/imageshack etc. etc. for hosting the big images – they allow direct linking without advertising etc? Although thinking about it (as I type) there’s (probably) a bandwidth cap and in this case would have been busted.
b*#$%*ds!
Sean: not enough photos to merit it. The robots.txt program should suffice.
ACS: I thought of that too… but another deal-killer is the trouble it would be to upload images and then match the addresses and so forth. Currently, Ecto does a great job of simplifying everything for me. I’ll just do it like I said… and if anyone wants the full-sized image, they can simply ask me.
>> and if anyone wants the full-sized image,
>> they can simply ask me.
Good point – nothing like a bit of positive feedback!
~andy
I think what you did, while in the bigger sense was righteous for the sake of the point, was totally childish. You could have been polite and simply emailed the person FIRST and spoken to them, and if they had refused then…. and only then go the idiotic route you went.
you embarrassed that person infront of their readers, without the SURE knowledge that they did infact do this on purpose!!
and to add insult to injury, * besides the fact that you acted like a child* was that you remarked on this persons faith, remarking they might in fact be liars.
You do not know them and should have acted in a very sad manner yourself. We all know this happens, but everyone EVERYONE deserves the nicety of having you do this all in private. You simply enjoyed the fact of getting to the person in public to shame them, which in reality really on shamed you.
I must ask you… where are your “morals”?
To steal is in fact wrong, no matter that this person may have infact remarked to do this is wrong in earlier posts, maybe they were given the link? who knows… all i know is, you proved yourself very unprofessional in your behavior.
As bloggers we have a ethical code to follow this is true… but this code moves both ways.
Have you tried using an .htaccess file to block hotlinking? Or is that the “hotlinking prevention” that you are referring to in the ‘described’ link?
I can’t help but to notice your server users cPanel. Why don’t you just log in and activate hotlink protection?
Lisa: see my comment on the originating site, where you clearly came from. You have the perspective of someone who sees only a tiny corner of the story; at the very best, you are doing exactly what you accuse me of doing: attempting to shame someone publicly under circumstances you do not fully understand. So shame on you right back atcha.
I have no shame and no regrets; what Paula did was wrong and she knew full well the elements involved. She knew about hotlinking, she knew the extent she was using the image, she knew how many hits her pages were generating. Just at that alone, she knew full well that (a) she was using intellectual property not here own, *for profit* no less, without asking permission, and (b) she knew that she was using another person’s resources to put that image on her own site. Whatever you want to call that, it is stealing. I did not invent her faith, it is hers, and she publicly forwards it. If she violates her own faith, she should be prepared to be called out for it just as publicly as she pronounces it and violates it.
As for my end of things, I give credit where credit is due; Paula did not even have the decency to link back or to acknowledge her source, which I always do. Whatever I put on my site, I am responsible for; so was she. If she neglected to note that it was not a “public” site (not really an excuse anyway, stealing is stealing, even if you steal from a public place), that there was no “royalty free” tag on the image, or simply that she didn’t think about what she was doing… then that was negligence on her part.
Tell me, if someone stole your cell phone and then made several costly long-distance calls which you then had to pay for, would you be kind and loving to the person who did that to you? Really? Okay then, now imagine that it has happened a hundred times, each time a major hassle for you, involving time, effort, expense. The hundredth time, will you be patient, caring, and understanding to the person who just racked up a large number of long-distance calls on your account?
Congratulations if you are. However, seeing as how you’re perfectly willing to rant off on this blog post in an attempt to shame me, when it was not even your ox that was gored, I am pretty certain that you would not be quite so loving about it were the tables turned.
K: I have tried .htaccess files, but they never work beyond the first imperative. However, just yesterday, I think I may have discovered the problem: I use a text editor on the Mac, and I think the Mac uses line breaks in a non-standard fashion… so after the first command, I think that non-standard break interrupts to file.
Besides which, an .htaccess file does not help when you don’t know who will be coming to take your stuff next. It might help if I can get the word “forum” in there…
Fhdogs: I have tried that before. When I have, people invariably comment to say that all my images have disappeared on their browser when they surf my own site. It causes too many problems for visitors.
Hmm… maybe browsers have improved to the point where that no longer happens… perhaps I should try it again sometime. Number 17 on my list of “to do”s…
Yes, Macintosh style line feeds can cause problems…
Can’t you just set the .htaccess file to deny any referrer that isn’t you own site? See the first example here:
http://www.depiction.net/tutorials/htaccess/hotlinkprotection.php
Of course, you might need to allow some other referrers so that web based RSS feed readers work…
I wrote a post about the same thing,
http://blog.g2-tech.co.uk/2009/07/hotlinkers-and-free-advertising/
I chose the approach of actually changing the URL of the image, and putting up a new picture at the old address.
I notice “lisa coultrup” seems to think what you did is wrong, I’m disappointed! I say well done!!!!!! People shouldn’t be hotlinking!!
Lisa was either a fan or a friend of the hotlinker who, from what I could tell, was not so much a bad person as she was simply thoughtless–she had all the information, should have known well what she was doing, but in her enthusiasm must have just forgotten to think about it. Lis herself, as I pointed out, was doing exactly what she accused me of doing–similarly thoughtless.