Dealing with the bandwidth leechers…

Well, this should be a tad amusing.

For a while now, we’d been dealing with bandwidth leechers on MK Online. I’d been more or less tolerating it, simply because I couldn’t be bothered putting in a remote-hotlinking solution on the site. I’ve had one set up here on the D’Arque Cathedral site for a long while; I got tired of all these sites starting to grab the image from my site whenever I made a post (thanks to the site cross-posting to LiveJournal), so I set it up where only my site and LJ could link to the images without getting a “Forbidden” error. It certainly saved on bandwidth issues.

Well, this afternoon, Murdoink (fellow MK Online staff member and webmaster of Mortal Kombat Warehouse, one of our hosted sites) approached me on the chat channel and asked me if I could disable remote hotlinking for his site and the main MK Online Games section. It turned out he had discovered someone leeching bandwidth off the site, and wanted to do something about it. I finally gave in and went ahead and implemented the same remote-hotlinking solution on the main MK Online server that I did for this site. In addition to the two areas Murdoink requested, I went ahead and added the same restrictions to our media section, as people were hotlinking to that as well… and as images displayed through the media system had to be parsed through our site software, it adds quite a bit of strain on the server’s resources. The main difference is that instead of just throwing out a Forbidden error, the server returns an image with the site’s logo and URL on it. :-)

I’ll probably adopt the same change to this site, as soon as I can get Scott Howell to adapt the banner logo to fit a similar image size and format. In the meantime, I’m just going to sit back and watch the aftermath. It should be amusing to see if people bitch and moan about the restrictions we put in place. On the other hand, I’m hoping it’ll cut down on our bandwidth costs.

We’ll see either way soon.

Plans and whatnot…

Well, yesterday I booked my flight to Los Angeles for next month. I was rather shocked when I saw how much it cost; I wouldn’t have expected the Houston-Los Angeles round trip flight would cost just under $200. Still, I’m not complaining at all, as it’s one more thing for the trip taken care of. I also should consider getting a 1 GB USB flash drive, a bigger SD memory card for my Cingular 8125 phone, and a few more MiniDV tapes for the camcorder as well. Those of you who know me can pretty much guess what this trip is for; otherwise… I’ll make the official announcement on the 1st sometime.

It’s still looking to be a quiet weekend. Dad hasn’t yet asked for my help moving anything, but I can’t guarantee he’s not going to ask. As it stands, I’ve been spending the day working on the MK Online server, making some tweaks and fixing a couple of issues I came across on the site’s Games section. I’ll probably end up playing more Cyberball 2072 as well, plus trying to avoid spoilers from Doctor Who (as the second season premiere is today). Oh, well… it’s not as if I have anything more pressing to work on at this point.

Oh, and one other thing DID happen today that I’m rather annoyed about. At some point this morning, the doorbell rang. Dad went down and answered it, and Mom mentioned to me that it was our neighbor across the street. She surmised that he was going to ask us to move my car; it was on the street and the guy has difficulty backing his truck out of his driveway when it’s there. Turned out that he wasn’t asking us to move it… he actually HAD hit it. I’ll have to go check the damage, but apparently all it is is paint damage. I’ll probably end up taking it in to be looked at later this next week, if I have time. Still… what the hell is it with me having bad luck with cars nowadays?

Oh, well… might as well go do something semi-productive…