WHY WAS "Post a Random Image" thread closed? archived

Dave tried to explain how using the img src tag is a big NO NO on MOL. I just don't get this. BANDWIDTH THEFT? I mean c'mon. First off, how much traffic can MOL generate by pointing to one specific image? But also, this type of concept of pointing to webpages and things on webpages WAS THE REASON THE INTERNET WAS DESIGNED. I mean seriously. NO REALLY. Seriously.

So you tell me why is it NOT ok to point to one image in a page which has a hundred images on it? But it's ok to post a URL to the page? If someone followed the URL you would load ALL 100 images. Let's do the math shall we? If I point 100 people to that one image that I want to it would be VERBOTEN and Dave would ban me. But the server that housed that one image would only get 100 hits. If instead I post the URL of the page which housed that image, WHICH WOULD NOT BE VERBOTTEN and Dave would not ban me, instead 100 people woudl hit the page which had 100 images on it. That would mean that the server that housed the page would load 100 images 100 times. NOW TALK ABOUT A WASTE OF BANDWIDTH. I'm not going to call either BANDWIDTH THEFT, however. But I will say that the policy doesn't make ANY SENSE WHAT SO EVER from my perspective.

OK, fine, I got that off my chest. Now explain to me why the "Post a Random Image" thread needed to be closed? Sure Dave doesn't want people pointing to images off of the server for whatever reason. But people could still upload attached images, like we used to with the old MOL. What gives?

I don't know if the policy against pointing to images is connected to removing the random image thread. Is it?

Anyway, I agree with you. If we can refer to images, then it will save bandwidth and storage for MOL. What's the downside?

Tom Reingold

The downside is other people will be paying for the bandwidth. Maybe these are huge sites that won't notice it, but maybe they're not. I know I wouldn't be happy about people drawing down my bandwidth without my surrounding content. More importantly, the image host could change or delete the image. If the image host changes it, who knows what we're displaying in the forgotten archives? If the image host deletes it, our archives get filled with broken links. The "random picture" threads are fun and irrelevant, but other topics maybe have more historically relevant topics. The old message board will eventually be imported into this forum and the reason we'll be able to make it valuable is because we've observed these simple rules. With that said, sure, I'll re-open that topic.

can we still ban alley? :devil:

I didn't understand how serious bandwidth theft was until I heard about a blogger who had her site shut down by her ISP because people were linking to a picture on her site. She went WAY over her bandwidth limit and was going to have to pay a ton of money to her ISP to get her site back up. It's actually pretty serious.

Here is something that practically everybody in the knit-blogsphere links to:

http://www.knitblog.com/bandwidth-thief.htm

One of the recommendations in that link is to frequently change filenames, so that thieves will get a broken image. That advice is sound - and will lead to exactly what Dave fears, which is archives trashed up with broken images.

Plenty of similar stories out there. Unreported for obvious reasons.

OK, but no one addressed my point. Which is that it's ok to link to the page with a hundred images, but not ok to link to one image on that same page. THAT IS RETARDED, NO? You see the LACK of logic in your bandwidth thief story, with that one example. No?

but the person/people/company want you to visit the whole website, and to know where that content comes from.
If I load a page a million times that just has a link to a page containing an image, I use less bandwidth on their site than if I load the page one time with a hot-linked image.

also, it is possible to prevent the hot-linking of images on a web page via .htaccess

Dave, thanks for the explanation. I buy it.

Alleygater, there is logic. You just don't see it yet.

First, people choose to click on links we put here. Or they don't. Many don't!

Secondly, people choose an MOL discussion, and it's accidental to the user that the pictures load. It's not the user's fault that it causes lots of accesses to other web pages. That hurts the blogger, but the person doing the injury isn't the visitor to the MOL page.

Hey, I've just noticed that when people toss in a URL here, it's not clickable. Is that fixable? It's annoying to swipe, copy, open a new page (or tab), and paste.

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