Idjits

Okay, I’m the web­mas­ter for Work­ing to Halt Online Abuse. And we pro­vide link ban­ners for peo­ple who want to link to the site. We don’t approach any­one about link­ing, we don’t do rec­i­p­ro­cal links—they’re just available.

When I first took over the site a cou­ple of years ago, I looked over the stats and found that an incred­i­ble num­ber of sites were link­ing to us and pulling the link ban­ner from our serv­er. I would­n’t like that in any case, but we rely on donat­ed serv­er space and band­width, so it was of even more con­cern to me.

First I tried being nice. I con­tact­ed the own­ers of the sites and asked that they store the graph­ic on their own servers. I got a few respons­es, and about half of those were very neg­a­tive. The oth­er half were polite and changed their sites.

But that still left us with lots of sites con­tin­u­ing to link that what, and it con­tin­ued to get on my nerves. It’s a small file, yes—but a small file loaded repeat­ed­ly on hun­dreds of sites adds up.

I did a total redesign of the site around that time, too, and most of the file and direc­to­ry names changed. Because there had been so many changes, we had a script run­ning that noti­fied me of any 404 errors on the site. And I was get­ting an email every time a vis­i­tor hit one of the band­width-steal­ing sites and tried to load the ban­ner graph­ic. That was tru­ly annoying.

So I changed the way the graph­ics were loaded, using a script designed specif­i­cal­ly to stop band­width theft. I get an email alert­ing me to when a site tries it, and gen­er­al­ly, I’ll only see one or two mes­sages from any site before the web­mas­ter real­izes that yes, I tru­ly mean it when I say “you can’t link to the graph­ic on our serv­er.” (Please don’t con­sid­er this a challenge—I don’t think any­one has found a way around it and would pre­fer to keep it that way.)

But yes­ter­day some guy who does web­sites for hock­ey play­ers spent all day, and I do mean ALL DAY, try­ing to find a way around it. I mean, the dan­ged sites he was mak­ing were already so graph­ic-inten­sive that I can­not real­ly see why he did­n’t just save the ban­ner to his serv­er in the first place and load it there. He must have the space. But no, appar­ent­ly he took it as a chal­lenge. And from about 7 am until well after 6 pm, he kept on try­ing dif­fer­ent ways to call the ban­ner from our server.

I final­ly sent him an email, say­ing sim­ply that we appre­ci­ate his desire to link to us, but that I would real­ly appre­ci­ate it if he’d just call the file from his serv­er and be done with it. I think I spooked him. He decid­ed that Big Broth­er was out there or some­thing. But he did, final­ly, stop.

But why did it take him all day?