Sheesh!
New AboveTopSecret.com Image Hotlinking Policy (updated again), page 3
privacy
reply posted on 22-4-2006 @ 02:35 PM by Majic
Some Like It Hot
The issue of hotlinking has caused a variety of problems for the staff and membership of ATS.
Aside from the staff receiving nastygrams from webmasters about "bandwidth leeching" and other grievances, members who hotlink to image providers without permission sometimes get a nasty surprise: the frustrated image host substitutes a different image.
Sometimes the image simply says something like "please don't hotlink to our images", but sometimes the substituted image is hardcore pornography. This can lead to misunderstandings and unpleasant consequences, like the hapless member being banned for posting porn on ATS in violation of the T&C.
Yes, this is the Internet, and yes, when you make a website public, you pays your money and you takes your chances.
However, that's the point: Internet bandwidth is not free.
It costs money, and many webmasters consider hotlinking to be an abuse of their service.
The Road Less Trampled
Though it is clearly not a painless choice, the ownership of ATS has opted to do what they can to be good "Netizens" and respect the legitimate concerns of other website owners, which is the motivation for this policy.
Yes, it will be controversial and I for one encourage my fellow members to vent about it and be candid in your criticisms (just please don't be abusive about it). Yes, having our many embedded images autoconverted to links sucks and takes the impact out of visual-intensive posts.
But the alternative is allowing ATS to become seen as a tool of abuse as it grows in popularity and -- far worse than a simple code conversion by SO -- potentially being "blacklisted" and globally blocked by hotlisting victims.
Then, instead of an image or a link that works, our embedded images would end up looking like this:
Could be worse.
The issue of hotlinking has caused a variety of problems for the staff and membership of ATS.
Aside from the staff receiving nastygrams from webmasters about "bandwidth leeching" and other grievances, members who hotlink to image providers without permission sometimes get a nasty surprise: the frustrated image host substitutes a different image.
Sometimes the image simply says something like "please don't hotlink to our images", but sometimes the substituted image is hardcore pornography. This can lead to misunderstandings and unpleasant consequences, like the hapless member being banned for posting porn on ATS in violation of the T&C.
Yes, this is the Internet, and yes, when you make a website public, you pays your money and you takes your chances.
However, that's the point: Internet bandwidth is not free.
It costs money, and many webmasters consider hotlinking to be an abuse of their service.
The Road Less Trampled
Though it is clearly not a painless choice, the ownership of ATS has opted to do what they can to be good "Netizens" and respect the legitimate concerns of other website owners, which is the motivation for this policy.
Yes, it will be controversial and I for one encourage my fellow members to vent about it and be candid in your criticisms (just please don't be abusive about it). Yes, having our many embedded images autoconverted to links sucks and takes the impact out of visual-intensive posts.
But the alternative is allowing ATS to become seen as a tool of abuse as it grows in popularity and -- far worse than a simple code conversion by SO -- potentially being "blacklisted" and globally blocked by hotlisting victims.
Then, instead of an image or a link that works, our embedded images would end up looking like this:
Could be worse.
reply posted on 22-4-2006 @ 03:50 PM by Regenmacher
Are you going to make alignment options available to the ats tag like the img tag? imgr = align right
imgl = align left
imgt = align top
imgb = align bottom
imgm = align middle
BTW, these img tags are still active.
As for webmasters that allow hotlinking of their images and then complain about bandwidth usage, they should get the dumbass of the net award.
Comprehensive guide to .htaccess
[edit on 22-4-2006 by Regenmacher]
reply posted on 22-4-2006 @ 03:51 PM by SimonGray
Originally posted by Mechanic 32
I do have one question.
will resizing work with the new tags, ie.: [ats200x200.... ?
At the moment it doesn't, but give us some time and it will.
Originally posted by chissler
Does images I host with imageshack grant me the right to use [ats] [/ats]
Yes, ImageShack's policy allows for images to be linked to message boards as embedded full-size images.
reg.imageshack.us...
Originally posted by Yossarian
And how can you be sure you have the right to use an image? I mean, if I find an image on a website that I feel would add to a thread how can I be sure I'm allowed use it?
Simple, ask the webmaster.
Originally posted by AGENT_T
sorry i,m a bit of an internt thicky when it comes to 'bandwidth' and stuff. surely if we post links. like i did a second ago
Website owners do like to get hits, but they do not like websites "hotlinking" as users are not actually going to their website, simply accessing a file stored there which is eating up their allocated amount of bandwidth each month. This is a bad no-no in the eyes of most webmasters.
Originally posted by jsobecky
Sounds good. But what happens to those posts that we don't catch, or those members that may be on vacation, etc.? Will the images just become unreachable? I'd hate to see someone penalized for human error.
We'll see when the time comes. Us ATS staff aren't evil, we will do everything we can to transition image links back to visible images.
Originally posted by AGENT_T
this wasn,t by any chance caused by the recent spate of "my weapon is bigger than your weapon" posting of countries soldiers and weapons of war?
I didn't even know such a thread existed. So... no it wasn't. Again, this is something that we are doing to support common courtesy among webmasters not to hotlink.
Originally posted by Liquidus
What I don't seem to understand is why we couldn't just transfer the images in question (the ones we want to post in a thread) onto a DESIGNATED image hosting service such as photobucket or imageshack. Wouldn't this take care of the bandwith issue for the external sites?
I mean as long as we give credit to the image source, I don't see how this would be a problem--unless the bandwith is somehow affected at ATS as well and they are trying to cut down?
I'm just having a hard time imagining this being a real problem because sites are so vast and plentiful that it seems doubtful everyone would be picking images to host from the same sites.
Ok that's kind of a-lot to take in but hopefully someone here knows what I'm talking about. Thanks in advance...
Imagine one of our more prominent "popular thread" authors creates a brilliant research paper here on ATS... Valhall did the FEMA camp paper for example. This one page has over 350,000 views.
Now, imagine the 500 kilobytes of images in that initial post were hotlinked from a website with a monthly usage level of say 1 gigabyte.
1 gigabyte = 1048576 kilobytes
With just under 2,100 views that website's monthly usage level would have been reached, and that site would have either entered an over-limit usage level which would have become extremely expensive or the site would have been temporarily shut-down by the webhost.
We would have caused that site alot of trouble, and no doubt made the webmaster one unhappy person.
This is why we are doing this.
