Hot linking in cache descriptions

[Dvixen]

[snip]1. Anyone noticed how every listing contains the 10 years icon, [snip]

Not at the moment they don't...

[o'cholio]

I'm still seeing 10 Years icons....

[Team Wibble]

[snip]1. Anyone noticed how every listing contains the 10 years icon, [snip]

Not at the moment they don't...

I'm not seeing them. That's odd. They were there yesterday. Maybe it's a copyright issue?

[o'cholio]

Um...this is odd, but I can still see the images on all the listings. Funny thing is, the graphic is being called from:

http://www.dvixen.com/geowhat/images/10 ... ticker.jpg

Dvixen, care to explain? I'm confused.

[caughtatwork]

Um...this is odd, but I can still see the images on all the listings. Funny thing is, the graphic is being called from:

http://www.dvixen.com/geowhat/images/10 ... ticker.jpg

Dvixen, care to explain? I'm confused.

You have that file cached so you can see it from your cache.
It looks like dvixen has disabled hotlinking to image and is therefore showing as a broken image or non-existent image (depending on your browser and settings).
Hotlinking is not a nice thing to do.

[o'cholio]

Ahhhh...I just cleared my cache and now the image doesn't appear. They've also hotlinked a low-resolution image from a different page for one of their listings. I didn't realise there was a term for it - I've always just thought of it as plagiarism. That explains Dvixen's sudden interest in the thread

[Big Matt and Shell]

It looks like dvixen has disabled hotlinking to image and is therefore showing as a broken image or non-existent image (depending on your browser and settings).
Hotlinking is not a nice thing to do.

I have done this before in my listings. What is the net effect? Does it cause problems? Shell and I have had hosting space for a little while now and I have been hosting there but in the past I have often linked to a picture elsewhere.

[caughtatwork]

It looks like dvixen has disabled hotlinking to image and is therefore showing as a broken image or non-existent image (depending on your browser and settings).
Hotlinking is not a nice thing to do.

I have done this before in my listings. What is the net effect? Does it cause problems? Shell and I have had hosting space for a little while now and I have been hosting there but in the past I have often linked to a picture elsewhere.

Let me put it this way.
Geocaching Australia has a co-located server in a managed data centre in Melbourne.
We pay a fee per month for hosting the server in that rack space (including power and air-conditioning, etc).
As part of the fee we pay for a 100Mbps connection to the internet backbone and have an allocated amount of data that we can push and pull up that pipe.
We pay for 100GB of data per month.
Now let's say someone goes a little hotlink happy and creates a link farm of all the images of Geocaching Australia, but only displays the image itself on their own website. i.e. When you look at their site your see pictures pulled from our site, but as a viewer you have no idea where they come from.
They don't pay for the download data on their website because it's pulled from ours.
So Geocaching Australia consumes an amount of download data because someone ELSE is displaying our images.
If the hotlinking is egregious enough, we tip over our 100GB per month and then we have to pay for an additional 100GB, increasing our costs by around $100 per month.
This is commonly called "bandwidth theft" as you are essentially thieving the download data allocation that I'm paying for to server your website with lots of ads and banner.
For very small images, you may not consider this a problem, but you would be wrong. If everyone thought "a little bit of theft" was OK, then I'm sure sending 1,000 people to your house to steal "just a dollar" would royally annoy you.
So hotlinking to images is generally considered a no-no and you should arrange your own hosting at your own costs to server your own content.
Now the best part of discovering someone hotlinking a bunch of images off your host is to replace the image being hotlinked with something else. The name stays the same so the hotlinker thinks they're getting a 10 year logo, but if you want to be really bad, you replace that with a goatse (do NOT google that) and then Groundspeak (or any other site) goes bananas because, right there, in the middle of the page is a huge pronographic image which is bound to upset more than a few folks.
I've done that a couple of times for stuff from my own site and you'd be surprised at the number of people who stop hotlinking after their own accounts are suspended from "wherever" for linking to pronography.

[emily~angel]

PMSL - I do not like being told not to google something, and by golly I choked on my drink, thanks for the laugh )

[setsujoku]

PMSL - I do not like being told not to google something, and by golly I choked on my drink, thanks for the laugh )

For others who have very curious minds, DO NOT GOOGLE THIS AT WORK

It has been around for many years, and caught so many people out, but as one person learns from their mistakes, another 2 will think it's a great idea to hot link and save themselves some bandwidth.

[emily~angel]

Or with kids around Thank golly I had Dora on )

[Big Matt and Shell]

C@W Any chance we can start a new thread about hotlinking from my post to save hijacking this thread?

[Dvixen]

It looks like dvixen has disabled hotlinking to image and is therefore showing as a broken image or non-existent image (depending on your browser and settings).
Hotlinking is not a nice thing to do.

I have done this before in my listings. What is the net effect? Does it cause problems? Shell and I have had hosting space for a little while now and I have been hosting there but in the past I have often linked to a picture elsewhere.

In my case, I am a happy gal when someone links to something on Geo-What? - providing there is attribution, and a clear link back. But just plain old bandwidth 'borrowing' (especially without prior arrangement), I'm going to get a teensy bit annoyed.

[setsujoku]

Have split this discussion out from the original thread so that others will see it, and so that the original stays somewhere near it's original discussion.

[Big Matt and Shell]

Thanks for bringing this to my attention, I'll have to go through and change a few images

What was also good was that I now know how to check the stats on my own site. It is also surprising how may hits I get from GCA per month!

Thanks also to the mod for spliting this out.