I didn’t get to see what the anti-hotlinking image actually was, so if that image was unfriendly, I do not know. However, I can attest to the kind of problems that inline linking (hotlinking) can create. Feel free to read this Wikipedia article on the subject for some basics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inline_linking.

Companies do not like their images to be linked directly from third-party websites for the reasons listed here already. TOPS Knives explained the issue of misrepresentation, using their web site image to advertise a cheap knock-off. I can assure you as the technical administrator for several forum-based websites that this is a much more common occurrence than you may realize. No offense to the Chinese, but I swear it seems like they have an army of people who work full time solely creating this kind of unscrupulous crap. Blast hit upon the fact that inline linking is also essentially theft of bandwidth. Now, some may say, “It’s just an image. How bad can hotlinking a simple image be?” Well, let’s examine that… Web pages are transmitted as HTML text, which is actually quite a small file to transfer compared to images. Images may say a thousand words, but they take up ten thousand times the hard drive space. Add in the fact that if an image gets hotlinked in one forum thread, it will continue to promulgate and get hotlinked at the millions upon millions of independent blogs, forums, wikis, and all the other user-contributed sites out there. Suddenly one hotlinked image is using up hundreds if not thousands of megabytes of server bandwidth the company is paying for. And web server bandwidth is not cheap, my friends. The web space itself is not so bad; the bandwidth to transmit that web space is pretty ridiculously priced, in my opinion.

Additionally, this stolen bandwidth is not generating the return on investment the company needs or planned upon. Is there really that much of a difference between the advertising a company receives from a simple (ethical) link to their site versus just a hotlinked image plus whatever text the hotlinking user decides to provide? That is a question that you can answer with your own opinion, taking into account that it will largely depend on what user-generated content accompanies the hotlinked image. Is there a difference in the advertising the company generates? Absolutely. Remember that many sites are supported via external advertising revenue, i.e., banners and other ads distributed throughout the web page. If all you are pulling down is the company’s hotlinked image from a third-party site, you are never seeing the ads on their page.

I would also like to point out that when a company starts writing redirects to block hotlinking, they do so in a blanket fashion. It would take far too much time and resources for technical staff to manually filter which third-party sites are allowed to hotlink and what ones are not. Additionally, even if the company decides to allow forums.equipped.org to hotlink images on their site due to the fact that we do so in at least a somewhat beneficial fashion, there is no guarantee that some poster in the future will not hotlink their image(s) in a non-beneficial fashion. The only choice web site administrators really have is to block all hotlinks, which is any third-party referer [sic] at all. The only web page that gets to call and display the images are the company’s own web pages.

So far, all of these points have described what hotlinking does to a company, or more specifically, the legitimate host of the image. Now, let me add a reason that affects the user who hotlinks the images… and it is one very simple reason. The image you hotlink is not under your control. At any point in time, the legitimate host of the image can enact hotlink blocking, and suddenly your image will not work or will be redirected to an image that tells you to stop hotlinking. Your post you made several days, months, or even years ago has suddenly changed and you have no control. The host of the image can even do something as innocuous as change the filename or the folder path of the image you hotlinked, and suddenly your post has no more image in it. You have no control, and changing the filename or folder path of an image is pretty much normal web maintenance and can happen with any web site upgrade or reorganization the image host does.

In conclusion, the final reason not to hotlink images is the fact that it is easy to avoid doing so. Sites like ImageShack, TinyPic, and Photobucket were made specifically for this purpose. They allow you to upload whatever image you would like to use on a forum, blog, etc. onto their server where it is relatively permanent. I have included an example to the left, as a thumbnail to the product this thread is about. Not only is this image hosted not on TOPS Knives’ servers, but it is thumbnailed so that even our forum users who still use dial-up (God, I am so sorry, OldBaldGuy… I feel your pain.) don’t have to wait 20 years for the somewhat large image to finish loading just so they can continue reading the post. That image is hosted on ImageShack, uploaded via providing the URL from TOPS Knives’ site (so I didn’t have to download the image from TOPS then upload to ImageShack), where TOPS Knives cannot block the image or change the location in the future. My post stays the way I posted it.

So, how about we judge TOPS Knives on their products, and not their sound web site policies?

Holy cripes! For someone who is supposed to be technically literate, I surely didn't understand any of this was going on like it had been.

I suppose it is much the same as any other public media we deal with, such as TV, radio, print, billboards. There's always going to be a group out there that wants to abuse the process, either by ripping off the authors, or just degrading the content in general. The internet just opens the door to allow so much more abuse than more conventional methods I suppose. It is getting downright disgusting.

Every day I am having to scrub anywhere from 1 to several dozen spam or junk mail hits out of my corporate email account. What on earth could these spammers be trying to accomplish, other than to waste the 30 seconds or so of my time every day permanently deleting every junkmail hit. I never open any of it, I don't even read the subject lines anymore. If I don't recognize the sender, it goes straight to the junkmail folder and then the whole list gets shift-deleted. It's like the stupid tampon commercials that they crank up the audio an extra 6 db or more than the regular broadcast just so if you leave the room you can still hear it, and as soon as the show goes to commercial I am mashing the mute button.

Counterfiters, spammers, hackers, they all do nothing more than degrade the whole system.

Pretty soon I am going to have to invert my junkmail settings so that only the emails I pre-approve even get into my files. Even though that'd mean programming a list of over 500 accounts, at this point it'd probably be a shorter list than the blocked senders one is.

I guess TOPS has gotta do what they gotta do, and even if it is considered sound web site policy, I just don't like it. I don't like being grouped in with cheaters just because the application can't be programmed to differentiate somehow. Makes me feel like I can't be trusted because others abuse the system. Kinda like passing gun control legislation that takes my guns away just because some bozo or BG abuses the right. That seems like a lazy way to go about things to me.

I don't get much spam anymore, but a Wells Fargo add kept getting through, several times a day. While waiting for a phone call, I saw it come up again, so I just ketp hitting Reply and Send, sending their own crap back to them.

I haven't gotten any for two days.

Not that it would be a viable method for what you're dealing with.

For me, SPAM = NEVER BUY.

Sue

LOL, oh the irony: I purposely didn't copy the image to my PhotoBucket account and display that on the thread because I thought it might be a violation of TOPS' copyright to do so...!

"Benjammin's head now swiveling back and forth like Archie in a comic looking at Betty and Veronica in bikinis on different ends of the beach.

Guess I will need to go see the chiropractor again today after all.

I am just waiting to see from which direction the next admonishment might come from...

TGIF!

Same for me with SPAM and Telemarketers

The real irony is of course if you google 'mini signal mirror' Blocking Hotlinking can be a double edged sword for a company.

AArgh!!!