Webmaster forum - Re: What's up with livejournal ( ... hotlinking)?

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Re: What's up with livejournal ( ... hotlinking)?

Andy Dingley

2007-04-19, 6:17 am

On 18 Apr, 21:35, Chuck Anderson <websiteaddr...@seemy.sig>

> Within five minutes about 50 different
> sites (different domains and IP addresses) were all requesting that
> image - and they keep trickling in all day now. What is the deal with
> that?

It's just the community bloggage effect, don't worry about it. If
anything ever gets posted to one LJ it's immediately linked from a
squillion "friends list" readers. Your bandwidth spike is huge, but
generally brief.

LJ also presents each LJ as a separate hostname, so it's quite easy to
build serious filters based on it. You can easily allow some LJ's to
be used as a publishing channel for your content (particularly if the
LJ is a feed pulled from your RSS) but require people to read that LJ
directly if they want to see full-size images.

I _like_ people linking to my content, that's why I put it there.
Please don't bluntly 403 the whole site, if you must do, build
something a bit smarter and have a bandwidth-consumption-sensitive
switch to a placeholder image. This linkage is _traffic_ and we like
traffic! Learn to make use of it, don't just see it as a cost, see it
as an advantage.

Chuck Anderson

2007-04-22, 6:19 pm

Andy Dingley wrote:
> On 18 Apr, 21:35, Chuck Anderson <websiteaddr...@seemy.sig>
>
>
>
> It's just the community bloggage effect, don't worry about it. If
> anything ever gets posted to one LJ it's immediately linked from a
> squillion "friends list" readers.

This is the part I still don't quite get. Blogs get reposted on other
people's blogs in a cascade. Seems like a huge and silly waste of resources.

> Your bandwidth spike is huge, but generally brief.
>
> ....
>

> I _like_ people linking to my content, that's why I put it there.
>

They don't link to your content, they embed it in their page with img
tags. No one is even aware of where the image came from (without looking
at the HTML source).

> Please don't bluntly 403 the whole site, if you must do, build
> something a bit smarter and have a bandwidth-consumption-sensitive
> switch to a placeholder image. This linkage is _traffic_ and we like
> traffic! Learn to make use of it, don't just see it as a cost, see it
> as an advantage.
>

I see it as nothing but theft of bandwidth, with no credit given to the
owner/provider of the material.

I do use something "a bit smarter," btw ... and have permanently
redirected all livejournal referred requests to a small "copying
forbidden" image. End of story.

--
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Chuck Anderson • Boulder, CO
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