Clampdown on hotlinking
 

I think that one of the new rules of the forum should be NO hotlinking of other peoples images without prior permission of the person who has uploaded the banner, because some members are hotlinking and it's eating up members bandwidths.

I would agree. My Photobucket bandwidth is likely to run out tomorrow.

Everyone hotlinking my sigs and banners will lose them...

I don't know why all the members can't sign up for their own photobucket account, it's very easy to set up an account. Even my baby brother could set one up.

Or they could use www.imageshack.us, which doesn't even require registration.

I agree too. Yesterday my friend hotlinked 500mb worth of my images.

I don't think it takes long to upload a image to imageshack.

I hate it when people hotlink my images.

Within the next few days, my Photobucket account runs out of bandwidth. It means that everyone who is hotlinking my banners will lose them, infact I believe James even hotlinked my housemate banners for the TiBB banners section.

I am NOT prepared to organise emergency hosting for everyone because in my opinion they shouldn't even be hotlinking in the first place.

Anyway, hopefully this issue will be resolved and members will hopefully learn to stop hotlinking.

I'm suprised even admins are hotlinking images aswell (including mine)

Exactly...

...as far as I'm concerned, if people hotlink my images without my permission, I hold them responsible for my bandwidth running out.

James does that and now anyone who copies the code uses more bandwith. If you delete the images anyone using them cant access them anymore. Why not host them on TiBB.

From Photobucket's FAQ on hotlinking.

Exactly. Makes me wonder why I bothered doing them...

Thanks Red

Thanks.

I'm down to less than 75mb of bandwidth. I doubt that will last long.

When James gets back I'll speak with him about what we can do to combat this. What I'm thinking is:

Anyone who has the 'BANNERS' award will be given access to a special area on TiBB where you can upload your images. If people want to use them for sigs etc, they can browse them and use the TiBB URL.

We would enable hotlink protection on that, so if any other site requests to use an image from the image section, it will deny it and display a blank image.

I need to sort out TiBB's own bandwidth at the moment, I got an automated email from the server last night saying we have used 80% of ours this month. I imagine this month will be 100gb+ of bandwidth being used.

As Red said, this won't be ignored and we will look into it.

- Mark

Good.

Now to rectify my situation...

...pay for Photobucket Pro?

Use imageshack?

Okay, I'll re-upload the banners to seperate hosting. That is what I was doing to start with but it was taking so long that I just put the photobucket urls in direct. Wasn't aware there was a bandwidth limit on photbucket accounts.

Have been a bit under weather tonight but will do it now.

There is a 25gb monthly limit on free Photobucket accounts.

Paid accounts are unlimited.

I'll probably just use my webserver...

Okay, I've changed the urls for the banners (and the codes) on the banner pages... http://www.thisisbigbrother.com/banners/index.php - anyone that uses them from now on won't take bandwidth from Photobucket accounts.

Thanks James :cheer2:

I just posted some banners last night and should remember this hotlinking - on my own domain I have hotlinking protection so I can use that if I need to. If the ones I've done aren't good enough to be hosted on the site then I'll host them within my own domain and use the hotlinking protection.