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Your Text: Insert Slimies » Insert UBB Code » Close Last Tag \| All Tags UBB Help	I just want to mention something here because no one has brought this up yet: yeah, us computer savvy folks here at the Asylum may know that it's bad to hotlink, but Hugh, did it ever occur to you that some people might not realize this is a bad thing? There are plenty of people out there who do not understand concepts like bandwidth and hotlinking. If you mentioned those words to them, they would stare at you and blink confusedly. Case in point: my wife is a language teacher, and one of her colleagues routinely downloads images from the internet to use for teaching materials. Never mind whether or not this is a bad thing. The real kicker of this is that she drags these images from her browser directly into MS Word documents, which apparently creates a link to that image on the internet. She asked my wife one day why her Word files were always loading up so slowly (my wife is the most computer savvy of the teachers, which isn't saying much). My wife took a look and suggested that maybe it was because of all the links in the files. When my wife told me this I was flabbergasted. But the fact is that this woman has no idea how the internet works, and she has absolutely no clue that what she is doing might be wrong in some way. And she is not alone in the world. Let's face it: a lot of people on the internet are clueless, and they break the rules that we think are so obvious simply because they don't know any better. Now, how far do you think a photo of a fat woman defecating herself is going to go in teaching these people the lesson they really need to learn? You are doing this to get revenge, perhaps on people who don't even know that they've wronged you. Just imagine how they would feel upon seeing that image. I have no problem with an image replacement solution to discourage hotlinking. But I think an instructive approach (such as those mentioned above by DL and WarMage) is far more effective and helpful than a vengeful approach. I'm not saying that everyone who hotlinks does so out of ignorance. But a lot of people do. And even if some hotlinkers should know better, an instructive image will still serve the same purpose (i.e., prevent your image from being hotlinked/displayed without credit). Sorry if I carried on too much here, but I have a real problem with the attitude Hugh has shown here (note: I do [i]not[/i] have a real problem with Hugh himself :)). I guess I have a problem with it because I was angry the first time I discovered that an image of mine was being used without my permission and without credit (not to mention sucking up lots of bandwidth--the culprit was a popular teen book author whose site gets a lot of hits), and I thought that the hotlinker needed to be taught a lesson. But after I cooled down and thought about it, I realized that this woman had no idea what she was doing when it came to the internet. Then I heard about my wife's colleague, and I decided that a more measured response was in order. Was it fair for that author to hotlink my image? No. But would it have been fair for me to subject her and her many readers to either a disgusting image or abusive text? Again, I believe the answer is no. But that's just my philosophy. I only mention it here because it occurs to me that you might not have considered all the possibilities here. Sorry for rambling. [img]http://www.liminality.org/asylum/sigs/suho_umbrella04.gif[/img] ___________________________ Suho: [url=http://www.liminality.org]www.liminality.org[/url] \| [url=http://www.ozoneasylum.com/4837]Cell 270[/url] \| [url=http://www.ozoneasylum.com/5689]Sig Rotator[/url] \| [url=http://www.ozoneasylum.com/22173]the Fellowship of Sup[/url] Loading...
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