Comment by morkalork
8 months ago
What was really funny was people image leaching off of blogs and personal sites and the owners replacing the image based on the referral header to troll the forum users.
8 months ago
What was really funny was people image leaching off of blogs and personal sites and the owners replacing the image based on the referral header to troll the forum users.
Yep, I did this. I had some art I’d made posted on my blog, and several somebodies liked it enough to make it the background of their MySpace page and use it as forum avatars/signatures. Pretty sure I saw a couple people using it in eBay listings too.
What made it bad is that they were using the full high resolution originals, not the thumbnails, which ate bandwidth like crazy.
So I did the referrer-based leech protection and started serving those users a tiny fake error dialog image, which was much more tame than what some people used. It’s funny how quickly those people stopped embedding, even without the image being anything shocking or objectionable.
SomethingAwful was infamous for doing this and sending goatse. You could get banned on forums back in the day if you hotlinked images to SA, so... effective strategy, it seems.
The movement to mirror ImageShack back then was awesome
A famous article on that: https://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1011
The fact that the image is still available is amazeballs in and of itself. It's left up to you to decided if you want to see which version of the grim reaper is available.
Jason Scott is still quite active in the tech community.
He’s one of the principals of archive.org, so that makes it less surprising.
aka "hotlinking"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inline_linking
My friend was being lazy years ago hot linking images on ebay, someone else's images of the same item no less, which they got wise to and replaced with hard core porn. He learned to at least steal the image and host it himself...