I’ve had to do something today that I was hoping to never have to do — ban access by default to an entire part of the mzonline.com site.

Why? To give the in-depth answer (which is default for me), it stems to the unauthorized and irresponsible use of images hosted here. What has happened is this:

It all started off nice and innocent-like. Every week or so, I check the access and error logfiles for the mzonline.com box. More importantly, I check the automatically generated analysis of these files for irregularities. About the middle of last month (March 19, to be exact), I noticed a spike in hits to the webserver — of about 400-800 extra per day. I also noticed a strange referrer pattern developing, coming from democraticunderground.com. Upon investigating, I noticed that a particular user (whose posts have since been removed) was linking to (e.g. posting HTML IMG tags) about four of my Monty Python and the Holy Grail images. What happened is a ballooning of hits, since apparently that was a pretty hot-topic thread.

My action: (unfortunately) I had to register in order to get the attention of a moderator to remove those posts (as it’s stated clearly in that site’s Terms of Use that unauthorized linking to images is a Bad Thing). But, they were all gone within about two hours. Problem solved, right?

WRONG!

It was only gone temporarily. In the meantime, others must have gotten the URL or thought it a good idea to do the same thing over at other boards online (whose hosts are widespread and will not be included in this rant)…because (rightfully so) they’re cool pictures.

A few days later I noticed another spike in the hits for the month. Only this time it was much more complicated (or emails bounced) to get in contact with someone in charge to remove posts. Furthermore, some sites weren’t even concerned with this procedure as it wasn’t banned in their TOS. I decided to let a few of these slide, figuring it’d be a short-lived thing, and soon these threads in question would be dead anyway. I was correct to some extent, but the true extent of this unauthorized linking didn’t come to my attention until this morning:

In two days (as new log analysis begins on the first day of the month), these dozen or so images had (combined total) received about 2500 hits. IN TWO DAYS! Needless to say, I was quite pissed off. With a quick calculation, 2500 hits (so 1250/day) of images each approximately 30K in size is about 37MB of additional transfer per day. This is clearly something which needs to be stopped soon, because 37MB per day, times 30 days in a month is an additional (approximate) 1.1GB of transfer in a month. Clearly a Bad Thing.

Now, don’t get me wrong — I’m all about using the Internet to its fullest; HOWEVER, I am NOT all about people acting in irresponsible ways. I do pay for bandwidth use per month; I don’t pay for bandwidth so other people can use it at their own leisure. I provide things like the Monty Python site so that people can enjoy it…as well as the other random stuff I’ve got. But I am completely against people just assuming that ‘they’ll never know…’ or such.

The least people can do is to fire off an email informing me of this. Then I don’t have nearly as large a problem with the procedure. So, with all of that said, I have banned access to all of my Monty Python and the Holy Grail images until further notice — probably when I finally migrate the Python stuff over to the Wiki fully — which won’t be for a month or better yet.

I won’t be taken advantage of; sadly this change will also affect those who have no intentions of doing anything like that — and for that I’m sorry and offer my apologies. All too often it seems though the actions of a few make the stark changes apply for everyone — and this is no different. But, the images will be back…because I refuse to let this take away something that I think is important.

Thanks for listening. Until next time…

This post was upgraded to the MZ Online Blog on 8/20/07