Idle Time

So I was looking through my referers for June and noticed this row:

#	Hits		Referrer
4	671	1.17%	http://www.phpbb2.pl/forum/i18n.php

Grepping the raw logs turned up lines like this one:

boredzo.org ☃☃.☃☃.☃☃☃.☃☃☃ - - [31/May/2007:06:01:11 +0000] "GET /plusminus/minus-8.png HTTP/1.1" 200 75 "http://www.phpbb2.pl/forum/i18n.php" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; pl; rv:1.8.1.3) Gecko/20070309 Firefox/2.0.0.3"

I’ve been hotlinked!

I always love it when people like and use my stuff, but in this case, it’s taking out of my bandwidth allowance. Not by much—those 671 hits add up to a whopping 50 K for the month (thanks, SuperPNG!)—but that’s not the point. This sort of thing is generally not kosher.

I wonder how goatse looks at 8×8 pixels…

Nah, I’m not that evil. Here’s what I’ve made to swap it out with:

On the other hand, the img element on the hotlinking page doesn’t have a width and height, so I could always use a much bigger image. Perhaps 8.5×11″.

But I haven’t done either of those yet. I’ll give them a chance to save themselves first, by emailing them and asking them nicely to host the image themselves.

I’ll let you know what happens. ☺

UPDATE 21:47: I just sent them (I hope) this message via their contact form:

I noticed that you’re using the minus icon I created on your internationalization page:

http://www.phpbb2.pl/forum/i18n.php

That’s cool; I’m glad it’s finding use. However, I do ask that you host the image yourself, rather than linking to it on my site.

I say “I hope” because I can’t read Polish. Here’s the form’s response:

Wiadomosc została wysłana. Dziękujemy.
Kliknij TUTAJ aby przejsc do strony głównej

So, I hope that worked. I’ll check back in a week and see.

UPDATE 2007-07-24: OK, a bit late, but I just checked. They’re no longer hotlinking, which is good, but they’re also no longer using the minus icon at all. Ah, well.

Categories: Website. | Comments: 2 (feed).