Yesterday’s post made me curious, could I possibly do more than just swap images that someone was hot linking to? As it turns out, yes I can. So I am not only swapping the images for those that are hot linking to my server but I am also tracking their visitors to record every visitor’s IP address, the date/time of their visit, what page on the really bad developer’s site they are visiting and which of my images they are trying to see.
Here is the link to the latest idiot:
//imagestack.co/299564783-lake-mary-events-center.html
The lone image with Sandra’s logo on still on it is actually on the Lake Mary Events Center web site. So I can’t do anything about that one.
And just to fill you in on why this is a problem. For every visit to their web site the content that the visitor downloads takes up bandwidth which usually translates into a fee from your hosting company, if you go over your allowed limit. By linking to the images on my site, my server takes the bandwidth hit instead of the site displaying the image.
Come to think about it, I should probably continue to allow my images to be displayed while I log the amount of bandwidth they are drawing from my site. And I am also going to add this tracking to my other sites to see how much of my hosting bill is really for providing image hosting for these @$$#*!3 developers.
HA! and this latest site… they say on their about page “All our pictures are gathered and submitted by our users” and they do indeed have an image submit form, the problem with their statement is that the form requires an image to be uploaded and these were clearly not uploaded since the links are to my site and the origin of the images is not one of the fields in their form.