[vox] Content Sharing becomes Bandwidth Theft

[ME]

Something that was done ages ago by people upset with this kind of
behavior was to reject all referring URL which are not from your own
domain.

This causes people who use your bandwidth in this way to have icons which
often do not work as expected. They must then decide if they want somehing
that is broken for many people or something else.

With apache you can do some clever things with mod_rewrite, and it may be
of some use here. You could possibly take cases where a referring URL is
not from your site, and replace it with an image that says something like,
"I am an image thief as I like to steal bandwidth." Then, when people use
your images, their "presence" is one of a thief. :-)


-ME

Jeff Newmiller said:
> I just noticed that an image on my web page has been used by at least two
> individuals as their avatar image on discussion lists.  Their use of the
> image doesn't bother me... but the fact that they didn't put it on their
> own webservers means that they are freeloading on my website.  Every time
> someone reads their posts on those discussion lists, my site gets a
> useless hit.
>
> I am thinking of moving the file (and changing all my internal links), and
> replacing the file with a different image that communicates that this
> is not acceptable behavior.  Any suggestions for appropriate images? One
> of my calmer ideas was a yellow background with black letters that says
> "Don't use someone elses image URL for your avatar", but there has to be a
> better phrase or image...
>
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