January 30, 2004
They fixed it fast
I discovered this site cause one of their forums users was poaching bandwidth off of my site. I reported it to the guys in charge and they fixed it almost instantly. Good work, thanks.
If you own an iPod check them out.
I'm interested in what you said.
What were they poaching?
How did you find out?
This is the same thing that I was guilty of awhile back, that you educated me about.
I noticed in my referer logs that I was getting alot of "visits" from their site. That usually means that they have a link to my site, but when I went to look for it there was nothing there.
The refering page was a thread in their forums area and I saw that the "gollum with an iPod" graphic, that I ran awhile back, was used in two of the postings.
Upon closer examination I realized that the poster had included the image by pasting in the url for the image file back on my server. It was getting a lot of hits.
I sent this email to the site's contact address:
> Hi. Your site looks interesting.
> Hope you can help with this:
> One of your users has placed an image from my site in
> one of your forums.
> It is the "gollum using an iPod" image in thread
> http://www.ipodlounge.com/forums/
> showthread.php?s=4ceb94acbfef57217aa3ed5eba
> 7d7d81&threadid=21681
> I wouldn't mind if you copied this image and served it
> from your own system, but having my little personal
> webserver serving up images for your commercial site, is,
> I think, an unreasonable burden.
> I'd appreciate it if you could either remove the img tag,
> or move the image to your own server.
> Please note that the image is currently being included in
> the original post, and a reply, so my site gets hit twice
> for each viewing of this thread.
> Thanks.
> -- Jack Hodgson
> http://www.jackhodgson.com/weblog/
In less than 2 hours I got a reply from them that apologized, said that he agreed that it was a bad thing, said he'd take down the link, and send a warning to the user.
I'm happy with that.
Hey!
I'm working here!!!!!
I got a shitty economy to send these kids out into, and here you are doing stuff on your own and working out mutually acceptable solutions when one of my kids coming out of law school should be collecting money antagonizing them and threatening them and taking their bandwithstealing butts into court.
It's like burning cd's or downloading movies -- it's piracy and robbing jobs and incomes from good americans, so stop it.
Now, go write them back and tell them you've decieded you want reparations.
And get some software that allows the commenting public to edit out incorrect spellings that only occur because on my IMac this font zize is about 4 and I can barely read what I'm typing, nevermind notice that I put an extra e in decided. But buy the software -- don't just make it yourself.
Piracy hurts all of us.
That happens occasionally to me, actually. The worst is when someone decides that one of the "backgrounds" (wallpaper-sized) on my site should go on their Xanga journal's background.
There's an easy solution to it that gives those who don't realize what they're doing a start and uses less bandwidth:
Make a small image (I use a little, pink "hello kitty" image) that you can replace the offending graphic with. That will solve the bandwidth issue and make the linking-issue public. I try and contact the poster directly, as they can frequently edit their page/posts. If they're good people, they'll learn from the mistake and not make it again. If they're not, that's where "hello kitty" comes in. Sometimes a small graphic with text saying "stop ripping off my bandwidth" is also effective, as it is a publicly-displayed message.