Does this make me a BAD PERSON? :)

[JuniperPark]

With a few thousand names, there are some which get worthless traffic because someone has hotlinked to an image in a domain I own.

I used to take the time to track down the webmaster and point out the problem. TOTAL waste of time. Most did nothing, and one even got angry for 'bothering' them. So I'm trying something new... having my server respond to an AD Some don't have a height=width restiction, so I can make my ad any size I want

Example of a site hotlinking, with my ad at the top:

http://useless-knowledge.com/articles/024.html

What do you guys think... a dirty trick, or a smart move ?

 

[GeorgeKGeorgeK is verified member.]

Smart move. They're stealing your bandwidth, so you're monetizing it. Folks have made responses to that kind of hotlinking by doing more drastic things, such as nude pics. arty:

 

[Bender]

I'll vote for smart move.
Very clever.

 

[Nexus]

Doesn't always show up, but turning image leeches into advertising outlets is a great thing. I prefer Apache to IIS however, when it comes to high-powered 404 kungfu.

~ Nexus

 

[JuniperPark]

Ok... I just got a bit ticked off over the webmaster that emailed me to 'stop bugging her' for pointing out the dead links on her site (and in her eBay ad templates!) that I wanted to make sure I wasn't over-reacting.

The only down side is I can control the href, so a click won't go to me,but I do get the 'branding'

Doesn't always show up, but turning image leeches into advertising outlets is a great thing. I prefer Apache to IIS however, when it comes to high-powered 404 kungfu.

~ Nexus

Not sure what you mean... my firewall went offline for a minute about the time you posted this, so that's probably why you didn't see it.

With IIS, you can put any kind of code you want in a 404.ASP file, so I can set that up to deliver binaries ads based on the extention (GIF, JPG, etc).

This is working even better than I though.... my ad shows up in their Google cache searches!

http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cach...ior/article6.html+"theo+epstein"+dating&hl=en

 

[stevey]

lol nice one. i remember when someone did it to me, used every image from my website to make a direct copy (my old clan site) so i asked them what they think they were doing and they said they had never heard of my site or clan, so i asked why there roster had the list of all my members lol, so i just turned hot link protection on and blocked them all

 

[Nexus]

Not sure what you mean... my firewall went offline for a minute about the time you posted this, so that's probably why you didn't see it.

No, I saw it. I just had to paste the image path into another browser, and it showed up. When I returned to the page the cached version jumped into place. May have been your firewall crash, but I also think it may be a header/mime-type issue. I've seen some browsers pitch a fit randomly. Prob. not worth bothering with though!

With IIS, you can put any kind of code you want in a 404.ASP file, so I can set that up to deliver binaries ads based on the extention (GIF, JPG, etc).

I know, some nice, high beneficial products based off of that simple concept. I'm just an Apache fan though. Mostly mod-rewrite being my bestest bud. Useful for stopping remote leeching of existing images on a site.

This is working even better than I though.... my ad shows up in their Google cache searches!

Cool beenz. :wink:

~ Nexus

 

[cyphix]

Nice one.... I did something similar recently when a user on a pretty large forum was hotlinking to one of my smilies images off of my forum constantly.

I did it with mod rewrite & have done this kinda thing before, but for some reason with this one when my replacement picture was to load it took like yonks..... anyone know why? You sound like you know what you're doing with this stuff Nexus!

 

[007]

I've done something worse. Someone hotlinked my images and layour on an online auction website. I contacted them and they refused to change them, so I made new images (luckily my old images were already of decent size) that blinked red and black text with my humble opinion of their tactics... :-D

 

[bellweather]

Smart move