the bblog

hot-linking fun II

More people stupidly linking directly to images on bbot.org! (Previous installment.)

Apparently several people thought the animated gif I made a while ago was neat. That's good, but they also thought it would be neat to hot-link to it, which is not. The bandwidth consumed was negligible, but damn it, man, you've got to stick to your principles!

The first person to hotlink it was one "Jamie", of Allendale, Michigan; while leaving a comment on "ahahahalex"'s myspace page. Annoying, but not annoying enough to take action.

Then one "Erieysa" set it to be his forum avatar. More annoying, but I'm pretty lazy, so I let it slide.

Then one "Iystarra" also set it as her forum avatar, and that was the last fucking straw. Before:


After:


Before:


After:


But wait, there's more!


The bbot account got nuked by a moderator with poor reading skills, so I made a new one, and tried again.


And that did it! Chalk up another one for Justice.

---

UPDATE: Or not!

In short order I got a couple referer hits from what appears to be a topic on their internal mod forum, and two e-mails.

From: Bill McDonough <billmcdonough@gmail.com>
To: bbot@bbot.org

Hi. I'm one of the mods over at www.leftoversraiding.org. I wanted to email you to a)thank you for the link (no such thing as bad publicity, after all), b)apologize on behalf of the organization for one of our members stealing your bandwidth, and c)pass along statements from our site admin. He's a bit snarky, but most of the snark is actually directed at the forum mods who didn't realize that the issue was bandwidth theft, and thought the site had been hacked.

And so, without further ado... Galthron, in his own words:

Greetings,

You have incurred the wrath of the site administrator. You totally made me log in for the first time in six months. When my people tell me that the site has been hacked, I am extremely unhappy. This is outrageous, I say, outrageous.

It looks like this turns out to be a case of stolen bandwidth. Am I correct?

If so, while I thank you for bringing attention to this continued plague of the internet, the way you went about it was not entirely constructive. The fact that you created two accounts and posted on them set off a number of alarms that ended up invoking me.

Do not incur my wrath again, lest I do something more severe than roll my eyes, unban your accounts, and type up a snarky PM. If you need more creative ideas on how to handle bandwidth theft, I would be glad to point you at some incredibly annoying but otherwise unoffensive animated gifs, and additional resources and server tools to prevent the crime in the first place.

As I said, the snark is actually direct at those of my compatriots who over-reacted, as he sent this in a Private Message to you and all of us. Don't take it as actual invective aimed at you. Once again, I apologize that one of our members did this, and promise that if something similar happens in the future, just drop a PM to Dulin (me) over there, or email me here (though this will take longer, as I don't check my email as often as I should) , and I promise you, we'll put a stop to it.

Anyway, sorry this happened, and thanks for taking the time to read this.

-Bill/Dulin

Oh no, you guys! I incurred the wrath of the server administrator! And forced him to actually administrate his forum! Outrageous, I say, outrageous!



I kinda feel bad about this one!

From: John Shimel <epogod@yahoo.com>
To: bbot@bbot.org

Hey there,

Just wanted to let you know i understand your annoyance with bandwith theft and image theft. Admittedly I had to have my wife break down the reasoning behind it as im not as tech savvy as she is, but anyways. A simpler sollution would have been to send a private message to the leads of leftovers and have them get on whatshernames case about doing that. We are a communty of friendly enough folks that we would have been all in favor of helping you out. If it happens again please just let us know so we can handle the situation in a mature maner. While your site and originality was provoked, and rightfully provoked, you in turn acted on the same general level through the violation of the leftovers site.

Anyways, hopefully if you have a problem in the future you would be willing to let us work with you instead of trying to make two wrongs a right.

Have a good day and hopefully you will not have to worry about such things in the future from our community.

Sincerly,
John

These WoW forum moderators seem unexpectedly nice. Perhaps spending all my time online with other /b/tards, abrasive assholes to a man, has colored my view of people on the internet. Maybe there are people out there who don't use "fag" like a telegraph uses "stop". Maybe there are people out there who don't know what a lolcat is.

Maybe there are people who... don't liek mudkips.

What was I talking about, again?

Oh yes. These WoW mods aren't dicks. Their admin sure is, though!