Bandwidth Theft...& Solutions

[fev]

Little things like new rules allowing this or WOS as solutions to fix this ailing site ... those are just a bandaid, for i think this place is bleeding internally from something MORE vicious
[b]BANDWIDTH LEECHING[/b]

How does bandwidth work some people may ask...
well.. everything you do on the net consumes bandwidth... for example you see the avatar in your posts? every one of em uses bandwidth. the smilies, here? bandwidth. the page itself? bandwidth...

all these things are files, they get shown on your computer by using a stream of data sent from one server to YOU. that stream of data is the bandwidth folks... right click on any image you see and click "properties"

here's an example....
[img]http://www.fevereon.com/mb/bandwidth.gif[/img]
you just used 22k of the bandwidth on my site to look at this pic (right click it and check its properties!)

problem is, not everythings as small as a little email button because people hotlink 200k files, and wind up trouncing servers that they don't pay for looking for places to link their images...


The Honor system does NOT work. It doesn't work with some educated adults, and it works even less with kids.If someone comes here looking for a place to host their images, do you *really* think they're going to abide by some rule that is only enforced if they get caught instead of one they're forced to follow by restricition in the programming? The only effective "honor system" i've seen is when theres tons of mods & admin running around like a bunch of nazis, ip killin anyone & everyone who breaks their rules, going to a point of nuking entire ip blocks of innocents to stop one piece of crap... it works, but its pretty dang unpleasant (but why whine when its FREE??!)... sound familiar?

now i know this place would suck uberballs if you went and became nazis.... but i can think of a little less.. evil solution for this... to eliminate the ability to hotlink images from this website to others.. its not perfect and theres ways around it, but i bet if you cut off hotlinkng to major anime & artsites your bandwidth consumption will drop IMMENSELY


What you got here is a bunch of anime loving kids skittering around large anime forums desperately looking for free places to upload and hotlink their images (since many of them don't host any themselves).. to their sigs, the picture posts areas... whereever...

guess what? Why don't they host members images? because it slaughters their bandwidth and server space! Some sites would need TERABYTES of space & bandwidth to store and display all the images if they did it themselves...(a terabyte is basically 1000 gigs) the bandwidth is already getting slaughtered, without them hosting the members art & sigs too..... thats why places like DA get so slow!


SO, guess whose name kept popping up over the last few months at one of em I'm on (gaia.com) when they ask about places that let you hotlink images, (theres "where free place i can hotlink my imagestell me pweeze" threads popping up constantly)
yep.
you guessed it.

I [b]found[/b] this place because soneone reccomended it for HOTLINKING IMAGES... now, I own my own webspace and hotlink ONLY from mine, but the link to this place seemed like an odd reccommend... it wasn't like "blablahfreewebhostinghotlinkfree.com" or something, (and I was curious w/ nothing better to do but look)... instead i find a small little place with an easily abused honor system and a news post on the front page that linked to a forum topic on finding ways to reduce bandwidth consumption.

on average the stuff i post in the picpost area is hit 200 or so times, but can sometimes wind up with as many as 500 hit over 2 days...

but here's ONE piece I hotlinked to the arena at gaia (from my server)... for those who don't know what the arena is, its basically a bandwidth slaughterhouse.. the number of hit depends on a number of factors, but if you get into the top ten, its even worse...
http://www.fevereon.com/gallery/original/s2kvsfev.jpg (77k file)
3851 hits 225,244k bandwidth used for this one picture! (fanart central folks only looked at this thing like 50 times lol)

note that this image was about 77k... if it had been.. say a 200k file (wasn't that your size limit?) i'd have used 770,200 k for ONE PICTURE...
if i hotlinked all the images i post on messageboards from YOUR site, i would've used 600 megs of YOUR bandwidth last month (and i tend to keep my files small)

I don't... but others do.



free webhosts rarely will leave your image up without killing the link when they see that kind of bandwidth being used on a hotlinked image (they can;t profit from your image alone being on some other site), and people scrable around looking for places that will... like here
Now, think about all those kids here who [b]don't [/b]resize their art, [b]don't [/b]reduce the quality to something more tolerable, *then* go off and link it to every board they're on cuz they CAN...thinking "no harm done, its just a few pics".. No hotlinking rules are posted on people sites for a *reason*

but i think my friend put it best :
honor system?
on the net?
HA!

think there may be a solution to this, but its depending on how the type of server & the wishes of whoever's hosting the site that fanart central's on...
here's a couple sites i found with more info
http://wordworx.com/
http://www.htmlbasix.com/disablehotlinking.shtml

but if solutions are reached i think it would be [b]very[/b] important to place rules & restrictions in the initial programming instead... those who don't like rules enforced by the initial programming were probably here to abuse the honor system to begin with, and you really don't need them.. think its better to have 1000 [b]good[/b] members instead of 5000 abusive ones. ONly ones who really hate cops are ones who wanna commit crime.. or something...

meh

[fallenangel]

I admit, I skimmed (not that your explanation of what bandwidth is didn't look very good), and I agree. I thought Denis did have something blocking hotlinks, but I guess not.

(*cough*but I still think the other two solutions would clean up the crap, even if they're a minor bandwidth solution*cough* )

Perhaps if there weren't 500 submissions, 475 of which sketches, there'd be more Fallenangel comments like there used to be (Denis, too).
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[cstdenis]

Well, the first thing I will do to start dealing with this (I didn't care 'till now when bandwidth is becoming a big issue) it rename the folder, breaking all existing links.

Then i'll setup a .htaccess with mod_rewrite to deal with it probebly (I didn't read those links yet, they may have somthing better)
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