Bandwidth thievery is pretty rampant. I only noticed recently that up to 69% of my bandwidth is being taken by leeches who’ve hotlinked to images here (moblog pictures, stuff I found elsewhere and uploaded to my server, and so on) and used them on their little free blogs. Well, the remedy for this is some .htaccess magic. David’s taking care of that.

What really ticked me off was one girl took this image and turned it into her page’s background. Which, of course, is very lame on so many levels. And also, the image looked like CRAP because it was cut off at the bottom, ruining the composition. The whole point was the footsteps leading off into at an angle into the narrowing passage. Fortunately, it made her text hard to read. 😈

There was even one person using a picture of me – admittedly a TRULY DORKY and UGLY one, if I do say so myself – to indicate the person they’re talking to in someone else’s comments is sick and probably not right in the head. Very amusing.

Well, this has now ended. Right now small number of Myspace users are finding that their “cool” images or “funny” holiday greetings have been replaced with this:

I wanted to use the one below, but decided to go with smaller bandwidth, as this came out to be 600 pixels wide! Talk about overkill! It’s from the form generator I quicklinked.

If necessary, I might go the route one guy followed, and use a 1X1 spacer.gif the same color as the text, or maybe a transparent .gif that’s so wide or tall it throws off the layout. I probably won’t resort to the “gay porn” or “goatse” maneuver others have used. I’m not looking to declare war here, I just don’t want to provide free image hosting to lamers who can’t be bothered to learn how to use a free image hosting service like Image Shack, Photo Bucket, or Flickr themselves.

I’ve used Photo Bucket before, and here’s a news flash: they host your images for free, AND they provide the code for the image tags.

And if people are so into sharing images, they really should be checking Flickr out, and incidentally learning more about how the Internets really work.

Anyway, this should cut down on the unnecessary loss of bandwidth:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?blogula-rasa\.com/ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(png|gif|jpe?g)$ images/SORRY.jpg [NC,L]

It’s already working. It just needs to be tweaked so that other sites I run aren’t affected. Heh.