Hotlinkers Wall Of Shame
While reviewing access logs this evening (mostly out of boredom), I noticed that Myspace.com had run up over 2800 hits to my server just this month. Due to limited data of my stats aggregator, I couldn’t tell exactly what was being linked, or from which profiles, but 2800 hits in a week is a lot, especially when the source is completely unknown.
The culprit was an LJ user icon less than 1kb in size, just like this one: ![[info]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
felix_j. Not a real bandwidth hog by any stretch of the imagination. However, due to my disdain for Myspace, and the site’s users’ blatant lack of courtesy when it comes to hotlinking, I decided to replace the image with an semi-obscene 1024×1024 GIF with the same name (it’s seldom used anymore, it was part of the Lupinia forum). And, to have more fun, I present the wall of shame, with the offenders’ LJ names and a link to their Myspace profiles. They will be removed at my discretion if they remove the link politely (ie, no attacking me, since it’s their own stupid fault).
[EDIT: After three weeks, they all finally fixed their profiles. Shows how much they actually pay attention, I guess.]
Fun with webservers! Yay! I’ll continue to review the logs, and will add to this page as I see fit.
Note to the offenders, if any of you happen to find this: I wouldn’t have minded being linked to if you’d simply ask, my email address is prominently displayed on pretty much every page on the entire server, including the root page of my primary domains (lupinia.net, lupinia.us, lupinia.eu).
April 9th, 2007 at 6:18:44
*chuckles* Oh my… I can certainly understand you there. I’ve got a couple of MySpace idiots hotlink to images on my website as well; so far, I’ve decided to not do anything about it, since I’m nowhere near my monthly transfer limit for my webhosting package, but I do agree it’s annoying that people can’t even ask.
April 9th, 2007 at 9:18:14
I’d have replaced it with Goatse or Tub Girl or something along those lines.
April 9th, 2007 at 10:36:14
The myspace types tend not to be the brightest when it comes to internet etiquette.
Y’know, theres that lovely animated cursor that’ll crash XP SP2 and Vista. Muahahahahahaha….
April 9th, 2007 at 12:34:45
Aw man that’s awesome. I wonder how long it’s going to take them to notice it (probably months). It makes me glad that all my images are my own plus a video by Brian Kent (that even states it) unless it’s in the comments box oO; I think it’s an awesome way to get people back.
April 9th, 2007 at 13:26:06
You should have typed a good little message for them on the gif.
And added their LJ/myspace user names to it. I’m sure the image you used was
just as effective though. ^.^
Maybe if they act negatively about it you can replace it with a political message instead. I’m pretty sure they won’t like that. lol
Oh well, you have more experience and knowledge about this sort of thing than I do. You know how to avoid getting into hot water yourself better than I do.
April 9th, 2007 at 19:42:32
Well, technically, I can put whatever I want, including porn, and they’d be at fault for displaying porn on their page. They were the ones who linked to me, and since there was no agreement that I would provide the image in question, they have no grounds to whine when I change it
April 9th, 2007 at 20:37:57
Oh god. I accidentally clicked one of those MySpace links.
*sigh* I so rarely use the word ‘abortion’ to describe things other than abortions. But with the ‘design’ on those pages, I’m tempted.
April 10th, 2007 at 3:16:21
mySpace should’ve been aborted.
Except, I can think of one reason it shouldn’t. It keeps all those yahoos busy on THERE instead of the rest of the internet, for the most part.
May 21st, 2007 at 20:03:13
You can actually alter your .htaccess file to automatically stop hotlinking from certain sites and display a separate image ^_^
http://www.javascriptkit.com/howto/htaccess10.shtml
May 21st, 2007 at 20:11:45
Ahh, good to know. Unfortunately, this won’t help much when I move to our new server, but I’m sure there are some tricks I can use in cases like this
May 21st, 2007 at 20:14:57
?_?
I thought .htaccess worked on any server, you just had to add the file to the directory you wanted it to cover? Or are you moving to a Windows Server :o?
May 21st, 2007 at 21:27:01
Yep, Windows. My options were to use Windows, which I’m pretty familiar with, and be able to have it up by the end of this summer, or use Unix, which is completely foreign, and MAYBE have it up in like 4 years, after learning entirely new ways of doing EVERYTHING. I chose the former