expiration date 

there has been so many bandwith thieves visiting avocadolite and her mini sites. bandwith thief is a person who link images from someone else’s server, instead of save the image and upload it to their own server. this act is also called hot-linking. this is very annoying… and costly.

for most people, these thieves rob money out of our pocket. can you imagine if our bandwith goes over the limit just because some stranger decided that one of the image on our site looks good enough to be their forum signature? you either have to pay for the over-bandwith they use or increase your bandwith allowance.
both of them require more money and bandwith is quite expensive, too…

all bandwith theft cases are annoying, but the most dreadful ones are (in my opinion):

1. weblog writer thief. they hot-linking images from my server. it doesn’t take up that much bandwith, but they never learn! they keep doing that, even after we send them email asked them to stop hot-linking. as this case accumulated, it becomes less managable. this happens to me a lot from sites hosted on blogspot, myspace and xanga.
2. forum goers. there are two ways, where one is more dreadful than the other.
   
   the less dreadful one is just a regular posting. i often come across this type on Anime forums, where they link images from plushie corner site, and goes… “look! this plushie is kyoote!”.
   
   the worst thieves from forum goers is those that hot-linking the image for either their avatar or their signature. our image shows up on all of their posts. the image request happens so damn often, that the bandwith goes sky high.

thank god that we’re blessed with abundant bandwith given by dreamhost. so, right now, we never have to pay extra for those thieves.

today, with help from Dreamhost Wikiand this site, i changed a few of my .htaccess files so that instead of getting my images show up on a random forum or someone else’s blog, it shows up as this:

i put this image to replace hot-linked images from the Plushie Corner, Expiration Date — which includes the photo area — and my Scrapbook.

hopefully, this would come across clearly, that they are taking something that they’re not supposed to.