I hope everyone is having a great Friday, the weather here is a train wreck which always puts a nice big smile on my face, I love the rainy cold days and it’s nice to finally see them here in Florida for more than a single day. As many of you might have noticed I haven’t responded to any of the comments that you have all been nice enough to leave over the last couple of days, it’s been hectic around here getting ready for tanning season as well as limousine season kicking off. Excuses…. bah.
Anyway that’s enough of the excuses, let’s take a few minutes to point out a few of the morons that can be found right here on the internet, amongst us.
In the world of the wild web there are brilliant marketing gurus and web fanatics that power the future and allow for some of the best entertainment available anywhere. In addition to the brilliance of the web and the developers that work hard to market and sell products online each day, there are also dirtbags of the web that make stupid decision after stupid decision.
Anyone that reads Extreme John on a daily basis knows that I have no problem giving props to those business’s and online bloggers that work hard each day to provide solid content and contribute to the web. I do stuff do share with bloggers and business’s online all the time, you can see one of my most recent posts titled “12 Bloggers that Share Link Juice” to get an idea of what I mean if you haven’t been here before.
I also have no problem with calling bullshit on things that I feel are bullshit, today I will be pointing out two different types of internet trolls or as I like to call them, The Dirtbags Amongst Us.
The first dirtbag I would like to address is the dirtbag that surfs the web looking for photos that they do not own or have a right to use in order to use them for their own personal gain. They often take images they find on the web and alter them to suit their needs, this of course is a theft and certainly the move of a true dirtbag.
The picture of the sexy bottle of tanning lotion featured above is clearly taken in one of our Extreme Tan and Smoothies tanning salons, I know because I am the one that took the photo and if you look you can clearly see our company name hanging on the shorts pictured behind the lotion, not something that was done on accident by any means.
Well the original picture was a full size picture, the screen shot from the website as you can see has been cropped from the original photo, the reason they cropped it out was because we had our copyright logo on the lower right hand corner. The loser that did it is from some bag of crap online tanning lotion company that sells tanning lotion illegally, and without a license. Now for obvious reasons I won’t be licking the bags of crap here, the less love they get the better it is for everyone.
The next dirtbag that I want to point out is the dirtbag that hotlinks images in order to save on bandwidth, of course when someone hot links to your images on your server it drives your hosting bill up, instead of theirs. If you are a noobie or newbie blogger do yourself a favor and stay away from hot linking images, it makes you look like an idiot.
I happened to find the next dirtbag because when they hot linked one of my images it showed up in my WordPress admin as a trackback, when I went to check out the page that might have been linking me so I could leave a comment thanking them, I was surprised to see they were just hot linking like any hard working lazy ass blogger would do.
Now as you can see from the image above I was nice enough to help the blogger by making a few changes server side (thanks to Chris from Colo-Cation.com), the changes allowed me to send him a little message in regards to hot linking. Initially my message was going to be much more exciting than “Stop Hotlinking”, but Dawn my designer wasn’t around at the time to make a hot little FU image to replace the hot linked image with.
As you can see when you hot link other people’s images you leave yourself open to be owned, I could really crank things up a bit by changing that image as often as I want, and you can only imagine the crazy things I could put in that spot if he doesn’t remove the hot link. It’s been in place for a while now so it’s safe to say he has no clue and probably won’t until he gets the trackback from this post, pretty amazing that a blog with an Alexa ranking under 30,000 would choose such crap tactics on their site. Sad, and obviously pretty stupid.
Take this as a blogging tip or even a business tip, don’t steal from others on the web because you never know just how it can turn around and screw you. Luckily for Extreme we have a Trademark and our images are Copywritten, it gives us an excellent recourse for collecting some damages from the first dirtbag I mentioned.
As for The Big Dud, I’m sure it won’t be long before either the image hot link comes to an end or the blogger stops by here to tell me to go screw myself, I look forward to both.
Have a great Friday and don’t forget to leave a comment and let me know your thoughts on the Dirtbags Amongst Us.
P.s.) The Big Lead seems to hotlink every image in their articles.
Cole Stan (2)
KyAus @ Those.Tips (2)
SafariDave (2)
{ 33 comments… read them below or add one }
Both of those things kill me, but at this point neither surprise me.
I’m having some hotlinking issues on my blog. Nothing too serious, but it annoys the crap out of me, especially since I don’t have a way to stop the hotlinking because I use images in my mailing list which are linked to my blog. ….Hold that thought! Just came up with a possible solution! Time for some fun!
Mike from Daily Shot Of Coffee´s last blog ..Patriot Blend From Newhall Coffee Review
@Mike from Daily Shot Of Coffee, yeah I was going to say you can handle that in the htaccess file.
@Extreme John,
That’s what I was thinking originally, but using images in the email newsletter makes that a real pain. I think I’m just going to host the images on one of my domains where there is no hotlinking issues.
Mike from Daily Shot Of Coffee´s last blog ..Patriot Blend From Newhall Coffee Review
@Mike from Daily Shot Of Coffee, or you can give the traffic away and host the images on Photobucket.
I recently did a post about getting permission to use images, I was not aware of Hot Linking. – Great another thing to be aware of. I hope Dawn will be able to produce some really good FU images for future Dirt Bags. I am glad you wrote this post the way you did, now I know what to do if and when it happens to me and how to say it every so gracefully LOL ;)
Ms. Freeman@Baby Steps of an Internet Entreprenuer´s last blog ..Google Wave Invitations Giveaway Drawing
@Ms. Freeman@Baby Steps of an Internet Entreprenuer, being graceful is very important. Haha.
I believe I read that post if I remember correctly.
Thanks for the tip.
Amazing, No matter how hard you work there is always someone right underneath of you nipping at your heels or stealing from you.
How difficult was it to track down who is hot linking your site?
@SafariDave, it’s very easy in Wordpress because it will show up in your Dashboard, well all trackbacks and backlinks will.
Good post John, like already stated above, neither of these 2 things surprise me, but luckily there are things you can do to rectify and ultimately prevent them.
Geoserv´s last blog ..11 Useful Online Tools for Better CSS Development
@Geoserv, thanks for taking the time to comment. Back when hosting costs weren’t how they are in today’s day and age you saw a lot more hot linking issues, with bandwidth costs much lower now it’s not as common.
@, Thankfully hosting costs have droppped and hotlinking doesn’t effect your hosting costs, it is still theft.
Hotlinking has and always will be frowned upon, they may as well steal your content as well.
Anyways, keep up the good posts, I was thinking of doing a feature interview with you if interested. Just me know by reply here, or through the email address I entered.
Thanks.
Geoserv´s last blog ..CSS Tutorial: Image with Toolbar and Navigation Overlay | Codrops
@Geoserv, thank you for taking the time to comment. As for an interview I’m really not sure that I have that much to say, or anything worthy of an interview.
Hey John, that stinks.
You probably already know but there are some great hotlinking prevention WP plugins that are available. Admittedly, they are not as fun as changing the picture!
Karl
Karl Foxley@SEO Company Blog´s last blog ..5 Tips To Help Increase Your Productivity (And Your Profits!)
@Karl Foxley@SEO Company Blog, changing the picture is the best part, I’ve done some pretty fun ones in the past.
@Karl Foxley@SEO Company Blog, hey Karl thanks for mentioning the WP Plugins for hotlinkin protection, I really should have mentioned a few in this post for any of the new bloggers that might use the info. Post idea maybe?
Sounds like fun(changing the hot link on ‘em). Paper trails are everywhere huh? Why don’t you do some damage on those links. You’ll feel better afterwards:)
Boy, I’m just glad you weren’t talking about me
The first time hot linking happened to me it was by a female blogger. I was very tempted to change the photo she linked to, by photo shopping her face on a very nasty photo.
Maybe better would be to put a caption on the photo and say “this photo stolen from ExtremeJohn.com
Ned Carey´s last blog ..Quote of the Day
After reading this post, it reminded me to check my Cpanel to see if my HotLink protection was on, arrrggghhh, it wasn’t on! Suffice to say it is now, so be warned bandwidth stealers we DON’T LIKE IT!
Karen @ Blazing Minds´s last blog ..Blogging Tip: Save Drafts for a Rainy Day
@Karen @ Blazing Minds, get’em Karen!!
@Extreme John, I am doing
and they don’t like it 
Karen @ Blazing Minds´s last blog ..Weekly Round Up – Interviews, Coffee, Goldfrapp, Christmas
I would love to see the FU image in their site. Maybe something like I am a Dirt Bag would be nice.
MichaelR´s last blog ..Travel with U.S., Canada Number Worldwide
@MichaelR, that would be a nice touch Michael.
I had no idea about the hotlinks, some of the tactics people are using are really frustrating…my blog doesn’t have much traffic but I get tons of spam already. It’s a waste of time for everyone and these jirks don’t end up gaining much anyway so they are quite stupid.
@Alan @ Glass Pipes, the spam stuff can get to be annoying thats for sure.
You can also turn that hot-linked image into a FREE advertisement for your blog. I have seen that done before. It apparently works as both a fitting reward for the slacker and a traffic driver for the site being offended.
Keith@Norman Rockwell Art´s last blog ..Nov 29, Santa’s Workshop by Norman Rockwell from 12/14/1922 Clintonville Gazette 
@Keith@Norman Rockwell Art, another excellent idea Keith, all though Im not too sure that my skill level reaches that level yet.
Low Carb Golfer´s last blog ..Tiger Woods – Bored Billionaire Golfer
@Low Carb Golfer, your exactly right. All this stuff does it make the web a less friendly and trusting place for surfers as well as people doing business online.
Duuuuude, you MUST write up how you did that! LOL
Dennis Edell´s last blog ..Blogging Halted Here – Don’t Despair, This Is A Good Thing!
I love seeing when people do that kinda thing – altering the images to make the end user look a bit ridiculous
Hard Rocking South African@Music Judge´s last undefined ..If you register your site for free at
I’ve had my websites coped before and it really sucks to have to waste my time dealing with it. These people are just lazy pieces of $h!t. I guess it just goes with the territory.
@Matt@Roswell Georgia Foreclosures, I couldn’t have said it any better myself.
Ok ok, I have to play contrarian again
I love it when people hotlink to images on my websites! I’m pretty sure Google counts them as links because I had a post with extremely competitive keywords go straight to the top of the search shortly after every blog and forum started direct linking to the images in the post. (Extra pro-tip, name your pictures with the keywords you want to rank for and that stolen pic ends up carrying something like anchor text).
I guess I take the zen approach to being copied – “Ah, thank you for your love of my content, I believe that the search engines will recognize your imitation as flattery.” G and Y! knows which came first, so they know the source, and they know who is such a badass that scrapers want to copy them.
So copy, steal, whatever, it helps me get higher in a few ways
Of course, its always best to be the original, so try to get those pics from your own camera! If someone can’t accomplish that, well, they’re just not competition worth worrying about, eh?
John@WebBiz´s last blog ..Notes on New Media
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