Well, I suppose it's free publicity...

[julesjones]

I was ploughing through my website logs last night and found a particularly odd episode of bandwidth theft by hotlinking. Seems that there is an American sports team of some sort which goes by the nickname "Dolphins", and someone on the fan forum of an enemy team had the bright idea of Googling on "gay dolphin dreams" in order to find something with which to insult them. So now there is a forum post with "the Dolphin dream" and a picture of a trophy, and "the reality", and a familiar-to-me book cover. Except the bugger just hot-linked to the image on my site, instead of doing the polite thing and copying it to somewhere like Flickr first. At least he only linked to the thumbnail and the thread doesn't seem to be popular viewing, so it's not trashing my bandwidth as yet.

I am amusing myself with the thought that American football fans are not as 100% manly heterosexual as some of them like to think, and there may be more interest in the book cover from other forum members than he realises...

Comments

[yourbob.livejournal.com]

American football fans are not as 100% manly heterosexual as some of them like to think

I'll see that and raise you "players".

;)

[julesjones]

[grin] I had a vague memory of at least one sportsman coming out, but I wasn't quite sure whether it was football.

[artela.livejournal.com]

You could have fun... and replace the picture for a little while (with a text explanation immediately below it that they, of course, won't see)

[julesjones]

I thought about that, and if it starts really hitting my bandwidth I will, but I'd have to redirect the references on my own site first, and there are several. I'm sure some of the Americans on my flist will be delighted to supply me with merkin-football-appropriate numbers for a "Dolphins six, Redskins nil" type scorecard. :->

[alex-holden.livejournal.com]

If .htaccess is turned on in the Apache config, you should be able to create a rewrite rule that serves up a different image when the referrer matches this site. I keep threatening to do this to Myspace users who hotlink to the book cover scans on my site, but it's not quite annoying enough for me to get around to doing it.

[julesjones]

Thanks for the reminder of that technique, though I'll need to check first with waveney if the server is set up to allow me to do that. For this episode it's probably quicker and easier to temporarily redirect the references in the site if the bandwidth suck gets to be a problem, but I really must learn how to do the .htaccess method (I saw a tutorial a while back on an anti-hotlinking forum, but had forgotten about it). Sooner or later I'm going to get hit with serious bandwidth issues, that being the way of the net...