Seibertron.com Energon Pub Forums

Seibertron wrote:Hotlinking an image is not poor etiquette.

Actually, hotlinking is, honestly, very poor etiquette, unless you know for 100% certain beforehand the person is all right with it. Not all pay servers allow lots of bandwidth, so anytime you hotlink you're risking that webmaster possibly having to pay out lots of money. Sure, they can contact you and have you take it down, but they're still out all that bandwidth before that happens. (There's a host of other reasons on top of that why it's bad as well.)

Do a search on the matter, and you'll see that pretty much everyone agrees that hotlinking is a big no-no.

I do think it would have been better if we had handled it politely (and I tried to), but your default assumption should always, always be to not hotlink, not the other way around.

Seibertron wrote:That's what the images are there for ... and I've never given tfwiki a hard time for using a large number of images from this site before either.

Difference being, when we use images from your site, we always host them ourselves by uploading them to our own server.

As for why I contacted MKall, it's because it was he who posted the news article, so I thought it made sense to contact him to edit the single article rather than bothering an admin about what seemed like a relatively trivial matter that could be handled by a moderator.

Jeysie wrote:

Seibertron wrote:Hotlinking an image is not poor etiquette.

Actually, hotlinking is, honestly, very poor etiquette, unless you know for 100% certain beforehand the person is all right with it. Not all pay servers allow lots of bandwidth, so anytime you hotlink you're risking that webmaster possibly having to pay out lots of money. Sure, they can contact you and have you take it down, but they're still out all that bandwidth before that happens. (There's a host of other reasons on top of that why it's bad as well.)

Do a search on the matter, and you'll see that pretty much everyone agrees that hotlinking is a big no-no.

I do think it would have been better if we had handled it politely (and I tried to), but your default assumption should always, always be to not hotlink, not the other way around.

Seibertron wrote:That's what the images are there for ... and I've never given tfwiki a hard time for using a large number of images from this site before either.

Difference being, when we use images from your site, we always host them ourselves by uploading them to our own server.

As for why I contacted MKall, it's because it was he who posted the news article, so I thought it made sense to contact him to edit the single article rather than bothering an admin about what seemed like a relatively trivial matter that could be handled by a moderator.

I can't believe that someone would sour a positive situation for the whole community that could have easily been handled by Walky contacting us to remove the images instead of posting an inappropriate image like that. One of the staff members on this site innocently hotlinking a few images does not deserve someone inappropriately defacing Seibertron.com without first contacting us and asking us to help them out. That is not fair to us and is immature behavior at best for which we deserve an apology.

Seibertron wrote:

Jeysie wrote:

Seibertron wrote:Hotlinking an image is not poor etiquette.

Actually, hotlinking is, honestly, very poor etiquette, unless you know for 100% certain beforehand the person is all right with it. Not all pay servers allow lots of bandwidth, so anytime you hotlink you're risking that webmaster possibly having to pay out lots of money. Sure, they can contact you and have you take it down, but they're still out all that bandwidth before that happens. (There's a host of other reasons on top of that why it's bad as well.)

Do a search on the matter, and you'll see that pretty much everyone agrees that hotlinking is a big no-no.

I do think it would have been better if we had handled it politely (and I tried to), but your default assumption should always, always be to not hotlink, not the other way around.

Seibertron wrote:That's what the images are there for ... and I've never given tfwiki a hard time for using a large number of images from this site before either.

Difference being, when we use images from your site, we always host them ourselves by uploading them to our own server.

As for why I contacted MKall, it's because it was he who posted the news article, so I thought it made sense to contact him to edit the single article rather than bothering an admin about what seemed like a relatively trivial matter that could be handled by a moderator.

I can't believe that someone would sour a positive situation for the whole community that could have easily been handled by Walky contacting us to remove the images instead of posting an inappropriate image like that. One of the staff members on this site innocently hotlinking a few images does not deserve someone inappropriately defacing Seibertron.com without first contacting us and asking us to help them out. That is not fair to us and is immature behavior at best for which we deserve an apology.

In addition, I'm not going to let the staff of Seibertron.com be the beat up bag for the TFWiki guys over hotlinking an image. Hotlinking hasn't been an issue for years, plus it's EXTREMELY simple to prevent hotlinking of images. If TFWiki really wants to prevent hotlinking, they could easily prevent images from displaying with a simple modification to their server's htaccess file.

Seibertron wrote:One of the staff members on this site innocently hotlinking a few images does not deserve someone inappropriately defacing Seibertron.com without first contacting us and asking us to help them out. That is not fair to us and is immature behavior at best for which we deserve an apology.

You'll have to talk to Walky about that, since he was the one who swapped the images in the first place, on his own accord.

Seibertron wrote:In addition, I'm not going to let the staff of Seibertron.com be the beat up bag for the TFWiki guys over hotlinking an image. Hotlinking hasn't been an issue for years,

Actually, it is still very much an issue for lots of servers. I may not agree with how Walky reacted, but hotlinking without getting the site's permission first just is still not OK, either. Nobody's entirely in the right with this whole issue. Just ask permission first before hotlinking to a site, and you'll never have to deal with this sort of issue again.

Seibertron wrote:plus it's EXTREMELY simple to prevent hotlinking of images. If TFWiki really wants to prevent hotlinking, they could easily prevent images from displaying with a simple modification to their server's htaccess file.

I agree there, but unfortunately getting tech changes implemented tends to be slow going for our staff.

But in any case, since I'm not an admin, just a simple interested editor who wanted to try to get this solved amicably (and obviously failed miserably), I'm bowing out and just suggesting you comment to Walky or the other wiki admins instead (and I hope you have better luck dealing with Walky than I usually do...)

Jeysie wrote:Actually, it is still very much an issue for lots of servers. I may not agree with how Walky reacted, but hotlinking without getting the site's permission first just is still not OK, either. Nobody's entirely in the right with this whole issue. Just ask permission first before hotlinking to a site, and you'll never have to deal with this sort of issue again.

Again, hotlinking is not an issue for people that know what they're doing. With a few simple lines of code (which I have provided below), tfwiki.net would be able to prevent hotlinking and this issue would be resolved. Modifying the htaccess file to resolve this problem would be the correct way to resolve this from a technical stand point.

Jeysie wrote:

Seibertron wrote:plus it's EXTREMELY simple to prevent hotlinking of images. If TFWiki really wants to prevent hotlinking, they could easily prevent images from displaying with a simple modification to their server's htaccess file.

I agree there, but unfortunately getting tech changes implemented tends to be slow going for our staff.

But in any case, since I'm not an admin, just a simple interested editor who wanted to try to get this solved amicably (and obviously failed miserably), I'm bowing out and just suggesting you comment to Walky or the other wiki admins instead (and I hope you have better luck dealing with Walky than I usually do...)

Walky contacted me and apologized. I stressed that posting an image with the "f" word in it is really inappropriate and unfair to the younger viewers of this site. I also provided him with some code to modify tfwiki.net so that he can prevent all images from being hotlinked on all websites or if he just wants to block images from being hotlinked on Seibertron.com.

Block all images from displaying on all other websites ...

Code: Select all

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?tfwiki\.net/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ http://www.tfwiki.net/no-hotlinking-error-message.gif [L]


Block all images from just displaying on Seibertron.com ...

Code: Select all

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?seibertron\.com/ [NC,OR]
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ http://tfwiki.net/no-hotlinking-error-message-please.gif [L]


Hotlinking is not an issue. If tfwiki.net wants to prevent hotlinking, they should do one of the two things above to prevent this in the future. If they do this, all of their concerns about hotlinking will be permanently resolved. I have also offered to help set this up if Walky would like my assistance.

Seibertron wrote:Walky contacted me and apologized. I stressed that posting an image with the "f" word in it is really inappropriate and unfair to the younger viewers of this site.

That's good to hear. I get really tired of the infighting that goes on in the TF fandom sometimes.

Seibertron wrote:Hotlinking is not an issue. If tfwiki.net wants to prevent hotlinking, they should do one of the two things above to prevent this in the future.

Ordinarily I'd agree that preventing hotlinking is pretty simple (as I have it set up on my own website, so I already know the coding). But the problem, from what I hear, is that since we're using a Squid cache set up to help with our load balancing, it's not necessarily as easy as just throwing up a htaccess file.

Jeysie wrote:

Seibertron wrote:Walky contacted me and apologized. I stressed that posting an image with the "f" word in it is really inappropriate and unfair to the younger viewers of this site.

That's good to hear. I get really tired of the infighting that goes on in the TF fandom sometimes.

Seibertron wrote:Hotlinking is not an issue. If tfwiki.net wants to prevent hotlinking, they should do one of the two things above to prevent this in the future.

Ordinarily I'd agree that preventing hotlinking is pretty simple (as I have it set up on my own website, so I already know the coding). But the problem, from what I hear, is that since we're using a Squid cache set up to help with our load balancing, it's not necessarily as easy as just throwing up a htaccess file.

Load balancing for a site the size of tfwiki.net is most likely overkill since the site is just primarily text. The Squid Cache also wouldn't have anything to do with whether or not they can use an .htaccess file, which would just go in the root of their website. Would be happy to help them resolve these issues. I imagine most of their issues have to do with MySQL not being setup properly to handle their traffic and not anything to with these other issues.

As for "squid cache" and .htaccess files ...

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&safe=off&q ... a56c95bda8
http://www.google.com/#hl=en&safe=off&q ... a56c95bda8

Seibertron wrote:Load balancing for a site the size of tfwiki.net is most likely overkill since the site is just primarily text.

Well, we also have a lot of images as well. There's also the overhead of people making and previewing edits, and templates, and similar things. (This is a wiki with frequently changing full webpages that has a few dozen plus people often making more than 500 edits a day.) The site was have a hell of a time at first before we installed the Squid cache, and up until we upgraded our server recently we were still suffering spells of the site not loading.

Seibertron wrote:The Squid Cache also wouldn't have anything to do with whether or not they can use an .htaccess file, which would just go in the root of their website.

Actually, it apparently does, due to the way things pass off between the cache and the server. But one of the guys has also said there's a way for Squid to pass things to a script, so maybe that will work out.

But in any case, I'm sure you guys are hashing this all out.

So yeah, about that catalog...

heh...

And here I thought I was wicked happy I was finally able to pick up my Henkei C-19 Mini-Bot Spy Team today (I'd ordered it in December). Now I compare Cosmos, Warpath and Wheelie to their G1 counterparts... and frankly I'm happier with the Henkei figures. Not that I'm not pleased that we get to see a Toy Fair '86 catalog. I am; I just like the newer figures better. (I even like the Henkei deco of Wheelie better than what's in that catalog. I thought at first his sad face could have been because of the yellowish color, but now I think he was just sad about how long it took to come and the fact that the box got smooshed somewhere along the way... )

Now if only they'd gotten Galvatron right for U2.0...

Good find on the catalog though, whoever found it.

Edit:

Seibertron wrote:I'd like to officially nominate ROTF Lockdown as a future BotCon or Club exclusive DEATH'S HEAD!!!

I know this is from the signature, and totally off-topic here, but I'd second that vote. You think Marvel would go for it though?

Jeysie wrote:

Seibertron wrote:Load balancing for a site the size of tfwiki.net is most likely overkill since the site is just primarily text.

Well, we also have a lot of images as well. There's also the overhead of people making and previewing edits, and templates, and similar things. (This is a wiki with frequently changing full webpages that has a few dozen plus people often making more than 500 edits a day.) The site was have a hell of a time at first before we installed the Squid cache, and up until we upgraded our server recently we were still suffering spells of the site not loading.

Actually, you guys don't have a lot of images which has been my point. In the past 48 hours, I have uploaded close to 50,000 images while I've been trying to restore the galleries after the server disaster happened last week. That doesn't even scratch the surface. I easily have a few million more images to go. Seibertron.com is about a 250gb site which has about 30,000+ people per day visiting which generates about 200,000 to 300,000 pageviews per day. 500 edits per day is nothing, and any capable server would be able to handle "500 edits per day" (that's 1 edit every 2.88 minutes). 5,000,000 edits? Then we'd be talking about server issues. I imagine the root of the problem with tfwiki.net's technical problems has to do with that it's possibly (and I'm assuming here based on the rhetoric I've been told about how "massive" of a site it is) on a $25 to $50 a month server, perhaps on a shared hosting plan instead of a dedicated server, and that the physical limitations of the inexpensive server are what's causing them difficulties. It really sounds like someone just needs to go in there and optimize MySQL and perhaps setup MySQL query caching which would be perfect for a site like tfwiki.net. As someone who has programmed thousands of websites over the past decade as well as many servers, I'm just offering some help out there to resolve a problem that shouldn't exist for a site that we all enjoy.

ShGarland_1383 wrote:

Seibertron wrote:I'd like to officially nominate ROTF Lockdown as a future BotCon or Club exclusive DEATH'S HEAD!!!

I know this is from the signature, and totally off-topic here, but I'd second that vote. You think Marvel would go for it though?

As much as I'd love to say yes, unfortunately I'd have to say no. Glad you see it too though.

Actually, Cyclonus' early appearances in Target 2006 had the white head colour scheme in the UK Marvel comics. I like it.

Just goes to show how a different colour scheme can improve or change a toy. Really like that grey Runamuck. Galvatron is nice too.