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Images and the leeching thereof
Baron Dirigible
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Recently I've been spending a lot more time in G&T than I used to, and I've noticed that almost every single image in any pic-heavy thread you care to name is being leeched. More than a few don't show up unless I right-click and "View Image", and whilst some lovely individual jumped to the conclusion that my computer's broken, I prefer the other explanation put forth: blacklisting. (And, yes, I've seen several "This image has been stolen" placeholder images to confirm this.)
Let me put it this way: PA is the only (sizable) forum I've ever been to where image-leeching is not a bannable offense. Is there any reason for this oversight in the rules? I know it's awfully inconvenient having to host every single image in an image-heavy post yourself, but compare that to the inconvenience of being blacklisted. If you want people to be able to view your images, either host them yourself or find one of the numerous free image hosts available.
Or we could wait until someone leeches and inadvertently goatses the forum. I'm not fussed either way.
PS. Of course, hey, if you've gone this long leeching images without a problem, then feel free to keep doing so. I'm just curious why it's overlooked, considering it's a major faux pas everywhere else.
Let me put it this way: PA is the only (sizable) forum I've ever been to where image-leeching is not a bannable offense. Is there any reason for this oversight in the rules? I know it's awfully inconvenient having to host every single image in an image-heavy post yourself, but compare that to the inconvenience of being blacklisted. If you want people to be able to view your images, either host them yourself or find one of the numerous free image hosts available.
Or we could wait until someone leeches and inadvertently goatses the forum. I'm not fussed either way.
PS. Of course, hey, if you've gone this long leeching images without a problem, then feel free to keep doing so. I'm just curious why it's overlooked, considering it's a major faux pas everywhere else.
Baron Dirigible on
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I mean, images are small, and most sites that are leeched from either have something that denies it (red x'ing, etc) or they have enough bandwidth to handle a few leeches. If someone's leeching a 2 megabyte jpg that 3000 people look at, then yeah, there's a problem, but who the hell would put a 2 megabyte jpg up for someone to see if they weren't prepared for the concequences?
And to an end-user's perspective, it's inconvenient having to "View Image" to see half of the images, and even more inconvenient getting around placeholder images (I know how, but that doesn't mean I should have to, or explain it to anybody else).
I brought up the banning issue because it helps illustrate how it's a major issue on other forums, whereas here it's not even mentioned. Whilst banning may be a bit over-the-top (jailing, perhaps?), it's not exactly something that should be encouraged. Especially when the site in question isn't a juggernaut such as IGN which can laugh off the leeching.
Let me put it this way:
If a site has denied leeching through red x'es or placeholder images, they've done so for a reason. That reason being: they don't want their images leeched. Now, let's suppose that Random Site A hasn't considered the fact that one day a hundred people will be viewing a random picture someone found in a GIS and posted in a chat thread somewhere, so they don't have anything in place to counter image leeching.
I know you guys take a perverse pleasure in "wanging" sites, but there's no reason to leech images when a quick upload to a free imagehost (or your own hosting) ensures that:
A) you're not stealing bandwidth.
and C) the image will still be there in a month or so for all to see.
I understand your last point re: the forum's business to police hot-linking, but it seems entirely pointless to ignore the situation entirely. If there's any chance that images won't be viewable, I think steps should be taken against that (by the user) and a mention in the rules couldn't hurt.
PA is hardly slashdot, sites only occasionally get "wanged" when they are linked from the main site, not the forums. The main site has readership several orders of magnitude above that of the forums.
1) Explain to me how it is stealing bandwidth? Generally speaking, people put stuff on the internet they want other people to see. Stealing bandwidth is usually a phrase employed by people trying to make money off a site without enough decent content to make money. Allow me to give an example, a small web comic starts up and has some ads. Now this is one of the situations where there is the greates potential for a real claim of stealing bandwidth, but lets think this through for a moment. The biggest thing a growing webcomic or the like needs is publicity, one of the best ways this is achived is word of mouth from people posting a comic or two on forums. Now obviously there is a distinction between such a situation and someone going through and posting the entire contents of the archives without the ads, but I would argue that is just as bad regardless of wheather the images are re-hosted or not. If the owner of a website doesn't believe this kind of publicity works in their favour, they can disable hotlinking or simply saying "plese don't hotlink theses images" is usually enough.
Your second point is moot, if the host is blocking hot linking, then if people want to post the image sucessfully, they need to re-host it. If the host is not blocking hot linking, then the image is there for everyone to see.
Your third point is also moot, very few threads stay around for a month.
All that I did was go to several topics in G&T, wonder why I found myself right-clicking->"View Image" to see a large number of images, and why hotlinking was so prevalent despite the inconvenience imposed.
That is my second point. I just want people to start hosting images rather than blindly assuming every hot-link will show an image. (And of course they can see it, it's in their cache; "so it must be a problem on your end").
In any case, feel free to lock this thread. I don't really care enough to push the issue, but thought the complete silence on the growing epidemic of broken images needed to be broken.
And back to lurking (and right-clicking) I go.
it sounds to me more like you are whining about slight confution that occasionally occurs in threads, and also chosing to ignore the fact that sometimes it IS the person who cant see the image getting something weird, and not the posters fault. i saw that in a thread...somewhere...yesterday. one person got a red-x and no one else did. it happens. and either way its not a big deal, so i really dont see what you are making a fuss about.
see? what "epidemic"? this isnt AIDS, christ. it takes about 2 seconds of effort to see the picture *if* it gets red-x'd/stolean image'd, aand, really, that usually only happens in threads that are hugely popular, that link to images from pages that are smaller.
im not sure what made this such a bug up your ass, but, honestly, i think life would be a whole lot less fun if they started banning people for posting images without personally re-hosting them. infact, i KNOW it would make the boards a less enjoyable place.
Let me just clarify: imagine, if you will, that you predominantly lurk at forums where image-leeching is one of the big no-nos. You then find yourself at a forum where everyone's cool with it. There's going to be confusion and there's going to be misplaced frustration. Let's just pretend I never said anything about the topic, because apparently it is a problem on my end (that conveniently enough only occurs with IGN images and not anything else, but let's ignore that) and the forums don't generate enough traffic to hurt the other, non-IGN sites. I appreciate your educating me on this matter.
Also, I never condoned banning. Hell, if you banned everyone who leeched images in G&T there'd be two people left, and they'd only talk about text adventures.
That was probably me, in this thread. That's mainly what sparked this topic.
At the very least be polite when infringing on copyright.
And as was said before, it's not as if the people couldn't disable hotlinking if they wanted to.
And no, they're not all broken, but the ones that are broken are all from IGN. It looks like they did disable hotlinking. Frankly, I'm wondering where people like BesigedB were an hour or so ago.
(edit: the topic I linked to is the same one I linked to in the earlier post anyway)
That's utterly callous. Won't sombody think of the children?
you called the fact that it wasnt a bannable offence an "oversight" == condoning bans
maybe you should just go back to lurking quietly..
I love the sound of furious backpeddling. It reminds of the sound made by a pair of balls slap slap slapping against something fleshy.
Does the hotlinking of the comic (as happens across the interwebs!) constitute a sizable percentage of the traffic to the mainsite?
Your avatar is cached raijin
edit: What lameass mod added the
nope, sigs either. thats why if your host goes down, you red-x
The point is that 100 people viewing your avatar on 1000 pages means it's only downloaded 100 times.
Where as 1000 different images being viewed by 100 people results in 100000 downloads.
For some reason I can't find a good anology involving indian leg wrestling
Again, I understand that, but we don't usually leech off of the same website over and over again, unlike how I keep beating you at ILW over and over.
Hyperbole is the worst thing anyone can ever use in an argument, ever.
References to Hitler?
It can be effective when used correctly. Generally it's not.
and sadly we're getting an object lesson in the pitfalls at the moment...
Totally agree. I don't see anyone discussing banning sarcasm. Apart from anything else it'd mean lots of jailed mods :P
edit: ban them right off the Internet.
Locked.