Mood:  irritated

Yesterday morning I was reviewing my Angelfire traffic statistics and discovered that EIGHT fanarts from my gallery were being direct linked from several blogs. It was a Russian blog site, which doesn't really mean anything except that maybe the offenders can't read enough English to understand all the DO NOT DIRECT-LINK warnings all over the site. But still, it's basic web courtesy, don't direct-link to stuff on other people's sites. Plus there's the matter of using people's original fanart without permission. It was enough images, and big enough images, and enough people viewing them to cause a huge spike in my bandwidth usage. I don't know how much bandwidth I get before going over the limit and access to the site gets shut down until the start of the next 24-hour allotment, but this probably came close.

So I had to change the file names on the images that were being linked, and change the links on the index pages, and make a "wall of shame" of the offending blogs, and title warning banners with the direct-linked file names and upload them. Time-consuming and tedious, when I could have been working on fanfics. Or, whatever, cleaning my house or something.

So, for the theft of bandwidth, art, and time, these people got my worst, clashing neon, large banners saying "This image and this bandwidth are being stolen from www.angelfire.com/anime2/nephandnaru." If my traffic report from yesterday after the time I made the changes is any indication, the problem seems to be resolved - I found one more instance of the images being called up by those sites, then it stopped. Hopefully once they saw my warning banner, the person/s who were direct-linking learned the error of their ways and took down the links. Hopefully. We'll see.

Oh, and while I didn't actually see the direct-linked images, many or most of the posts on these blog threads were locked, "friends-only." Maybe they thought they wouldn't get caught if they locked their posts and I couldn't see them. But the file-request reports from the Angelfire servers don't lie, and they don't care about locked blog entries. If someone's direct-linking, I'll find out, no matter what they try to do to hide it.

If it continues to be a problem, I'll have to move the galleries to my free Angelfire space, which is locked against remote-loading. You know those little "this image hosted by Anglefire" banners? That's what you get when you try to remote-load from a free Angelfire site. I hate to do it because of the ads, but I have to protect my bandwidth, which I'm paying for, and also I feel an obligation to do my part to protect my fanart contributors from theft of their art.

It especially ticks me off because the only reason people can remote-load from my site in the first place is because I'm paying every month for the premium service. So they're catching a free ride on my $8.95 a month. What if I decided to quit paying the monthly subscription? (Not that I could; the site's too big now for the amount of free storage you get.) But then they'd HAVE to do it the right way, which is save the image to their own computer or online storage space. If nothing else, there's always Photobucket.