(no subject)

[kingandy]

Huh.

Well I guess you've made it when people start stealing your comic.

Note to self, add URL and thievery message to strip template...

Comments

[kingandy]

I've never felt the need to ask permission to link somebody; the point of the interweb is to be read (the real reason to email somebody and ask permission to link is to let them know that you've linked them and fish for a link back). Directly referencing an image from the site itself is distinctly bad etiquette, but in this case it's only people who would have been reading the comic anyway^[1], and it could very well increase readership overall.

So, yeah, ambivalent.

[1] As opposed to, say, simply slapping somebody else's comic on your website, so that everybody who visits your website drains their bandwidth.

[masati.livejournal.com]

Do you have access to the VirtualHost or .htaccess files for that site (or non-apache equivilent if they're that way inclined)? If so I might be able to work out some directives that'll not let people with an incorrect referrer feild view the comic (or possibly to see another image instead; that might be a bit more tricky).

It could conceivably stop people with browsers set not to provide referrer information from viewing it; we could possibly work out a percentage if you have access to the raw specialschool.spiderforest.com logs.

Alternatively, a bit of PHP or similar to the same effect (if you have that level of access) could be used.

If you don't have this level of access I could help you set up a site that did.

Of course there's nothing stopping this site (or similar) from getting round this in several easy-to-manage ways; downloading the comic validly and then hosting it themselves until it changes would be one mechansm.

[kingandy]

I don't have access to any of that stuff, but I know a man who does (the SpiderForest webmaster). It depends on how concerned he is about it. TBH I thought he'd already clamped down on non-internal image requests, I had to go elsewhere to host the comic's banner.