Drew
AmatoSauce is not your free image host12.10.09
Since I got unfired, I’ve been taking my role as AmatoSauce technical retard almost seriously.
So I was looking at the server stats, and I saw this:
Uh… what?
I know we think we’re funny; but 1500 views A DAY seems a little unlikely.
So, I look into it a bit more, and see lots of traffic coming from other sites (forum sites, mostly). That seems weird that lots of people would be linking to AS.
Oh wait, they’re not looking. They’re just hot-linking our images and stealing our bandwith:
“How can that be?”, you’re thinking.
Well, it looks like Google loves us:
(P.S. I feel bad for Caitlynn, now.)
So, this bugs me, even though it doesn’t actually matter for shit.
It’s the principle.
Any suggestions for what we do with hot-linked images?
Options:
– Nothing (BORING!)
– Replace them with random porn images. (GOOD, BUT DONE BEFORE)
– Watermark them with AS; presumably Mike’s choice (LAME!)
– Replace them goatse; for bonus, only do it ever third or fourth time someone looks at it (ALWAYS A CLASSIC)
– Replace them with “please don’t hotlink, douche-bag” images (LAME!)
– or my favourite: Watermark them more subtly/humourously. Like this:
I’m guessing if the follow the bait; they won’t be hot-linking to our images again.
(P.S. Yes, I was bored today.)
(Also P.S., obviously, don’t look at the lemonparty link at work. Unless you work somewhere exceptionally cool with NSFW images.)
Well Drew, I think your favourite suggestion is the best one. Especially if I ‘accidentally’ fall for it and i get to visit lemonparty. Personally, I ‘review the material’ hosted on lemonparty every day.
I agree, although isn’t that a bit hypocritical, seeing as I do that with stuff I post here all the time? No matter!
For once…and ONLY once I agree with Tom. Isnt that just what we do to someone else?! (Except sometimes I take and uploade the image so its our own bandwidth…does that make sense?) However, Im SO down for replacing them with dumb ass watermarks.
Its actually all pretty interesting. I knew we should have rehosted and watermarked the images!
Alan: Ah, you’ve highlighted a fair point — this only works as discouragement for people who don’t *enjoy* looking at lemonparty.org. I, myself, only need an excuse and I’m away…
Tom & Mike: That’s my point; obviously we’re all *stealing* images, I don’t think AS would work without it. But *hot-linking* them is another issue.
If nothing else, it means that AS gets fucked up if a site takes down their images; for example, Tom’s post is currently not working; it looks like the site is down.
So yeah, I’m fully on-board with “acquiring” images from other sites. But we should be downloading them, and then uploading them to Wordpress, like you said, Mike. (Wordpress makes it really really easy; just click the little “insert image” button above the post-editing box, and the image is uploaded to AS and hosted there.)
(Similarly, I’m only suggesting watermarking images when they’re used on other sites; if someone just saves what they see on the page, then it will be fine.)
Anyway, the consensus seems to be “obnoxious watermarking”, so now I’m going to go see if I can actually do it…
So what was the conclusion then? What’s happening? I had a look where you said that the pictures were watermarked, but they didn’t appear to be for me.
Because if you look at them from here first, then they’re not watermarked, and that’s cached by the browser.
Go to one of the other sites (any of the ones I linked) and reload the page. Like Ctrl-Refresh the page, and you should see the AS images as watermarked.