eBay image hotlinkers

[Illusion]

It was brought to my attention that some sellers of pirate Knightmare DVDs on eBay were hotlinking to images on knightmare.com to illustrate their auction.

Thanks to Keith aka The Brollachan who sent me a little script to stop this and send out an alternative image instead. The auction pages now look rather amusing:

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/knightmare-DVD-Se ... dZViewItem

[TheBrollachan]

In total the following aucitions all are/were attempting to hotlink...
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/knightmare-DVD-Se ... dZViewItem
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Knightmare-Dungeo ... dZViewItem
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Knightmare-Dungeo ... dZViewItem
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/knightmare-DVD-Se ... dZViewItem

Hotlinking to images on this site causes a drain on knightmare.com's bandwidth, and was one of the contributing factors to why the site exceeded its bandwidth last month.

Edit note: If going straight from those auctions to this site you may have to force the cache to be reloaded by hitting [Ctrl] + [F5].

[Illusion]

Okay, I've just edited the image so that the "image thief" bit has been removed. Just that I've now received complaints that the message is appearing on some other sites which people have quite innocently linked to the odd image here and there! (not that I had any knowledge of!).

:o

[TheBrollachan]

In my opinion that is there hard luck. I assume they didn't ask if they could 'borrow' Knightmare.com's bandwidth prior. They aren't the ones who have to pay for the hosting, which I image costs quite a bit due to the bandwidth used.

Ok I was thinking myself about sending an altered version of the pic with the "Image thief" bit replaced to mention that all KM DVD sales are of authorised copies and are illegal, as the bulk of the hotlinking has occured on ebay.

[NeilJones]

Assuming Keith's script is something that you drop in the root of the web server, then it would be possible to make another file which you drop in another folder and anything in there one can hot-link from (for example if you want to remote host something from your own site for display on a forum).

But having said that, its still very inconsiderate to hot-link in the first place when its not your site.. It's really not a lot of effort to download the picture you want and put it somewhere else, in eBay's case you can actually upload your picture to their server.

This method, IIRC, can be tweaked to allow remote-loading only from certain domains.

My previous project I caught images being loaded from my server for display onto a web forum. I think somebody had tacked it onto their signature so I had a few thousand hits listed in the web stat logs from this one web server all linking to the same image. They'd have got away with it as well if I hadn't checked the web stats on occasion.

[djoska]

I did like the idea of making the ebay seller's image change!! v.knice!

I bet he's still out there rubbin' his hands ripping off innocent fans who have yet to discover this discussion!!