Browsing my website logs, I’ve noticed that some ChessUp users have been hotlinking to my images from their forums / blogs.

In general, I am fine with this.  Hey, you guys like the tool…I’d be crazy to complain about that.  All I ask is that you be kind and post a little link on your webpage to my humble site.

But I do have 2 point that I think everyone should be aware of:

1) If you run a forum and users are able to post links to scripts on other websites, that is a pretty big security violation.  You can trust me…but what about some other site where a guy has embedded a malicious PHP script?  This is one of the reasons I created the ChessUp Forums.  Users can link to my image creation script, but ONLY when the script is coming from my own site.

2) I reserve the right to embed a text link to my site in images if they are hotlinked.  It will not be ugly and surely won’t be as intrusive as a watermark, but it will probably just be some small text at the bottom of the image that says “http://chessup.net”.  If you want to avoid that, you can always download the image that you create with ChessUp and host it on your own servers.

Cliff Notes Version of this post: I’m not against hotlinking, but please provide credit somewhere on your blog if you are going to use my bandwidth.  Additionally, I may put a text link in hotlinked images.  And be sure your forums are secure.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 31st, 2006 at 4:00 am and is filed under ChessUp. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.