There's a dark side to the fact that so many companies are providing such deep image searches. People are getting lazy.
Now, mind you, by month's end, i've got plenty of bandwidth left. In fact, even in my biggest months, i seldom break more than 2/25ths of the bandwidth i have, and Dreamhost (the best damn hosting company on the Internet) even credits my biggest bandwidth day to avoid going broke if i ever got slashdotted.
So i really don't mind if folks hotlink to images i create here, with a few exceptions:
1. i'd like credit. it can be nothing more than a link back to where the original image was displayed (and yes, that's how all the image servers work). Naturally, i'd have to be able to see that to verify it.
2. Don't use an image as your .sig in some forum. That really drives bandwidth through the ceiling as some browsers do multiple fetches.
3. It has to be an image i created and therefore have rights to. So hands off the smilies Steve did in the forum, and the images for Delphic Research (since the better ones were done by the esteemed Richard Wilson.
4. Stay off my radar. Every month or so i go over the referrer log to see who loves me. Usually, it's nobody, but on occasion i find some clever lad who's decided to use an image from here to some illicit end. When you break the top ten referrers, you're just begging me to screw with you.
Seriously. It's not the bandwidth, it's the fact that you're dumb enough to assume that i won't notice and do something to make your life difficult. F'rinstance with the aforementioned smilies, some numbnut decided to have his forum hotlink directly to mine (Steve's). They were tiny, and they added up, but more importantly, they presumed i'd never change them.
Boy golly were they wrong.
So one morning all their 
became 
(there are others, that one was probably the most printable). For some strange reason, there seemed to be a surprising drop of usage after that.
Yesterday i noticed that someone had used the copy of Darth Pikachu i had made (in order to be nice to the original site). Unfortunately, i couldn't see the games forum that they were using the image, so i had no idea how it was being used, but golly there were a lot of hits coming to that image.
Still, how could i be blamed for wanting to freshen up my images from time to time, so through the magic that is Apache's mod_rewrite, he now sees:
Odd. As of [19/Nov/2004:07:36:33 -0800] he's still not changed his sig.
heh heh heh
Paul,
Do you have any idea how hard it is to pick out the bits of lettuce I just sprayed into my keyboard?
Well done, sir! I'll no longer be reading your replies while eating lunch.
Now I'm tempted to start swiping images from here just to see what you'd replace 'em with.
But then I wouldn't make enough bandwidth for you to notice, so they wouldn't change, and I would be sad.
[...] ect link to someone else's images is kind of a bad idea. The biggest reason is that it gives the other person the ability to do "bad things". (in the case of the Herc post [...]
Save This Page
yeah… you are simply evil and clairvoyant. How did you know about my scrotum condition?
How would you like to be the game developer assigned to Team Barbie… I can just imagine the guy, all dressed in black with an "I read your email" shirt on working on the 3D wireframes for Twinkles the Horse.
Time to find a new job, dude.