I run my blog from a small Internet link so I keep a close eye on the bandwidth. I was surprised to find tens of thousands of downloads for an image I had on my blog. Turns out some not-very-thoughtful person at a message board site had decided to offer my image URL as a little chat room icon they could use. And so it gets loaded, over and over again, by people who have nothing to do with my blog. Grr.

I've renamed the image but the irony is the uncacheable 404 response I'm sending now probably will be more expensive than just sending the image. They only render the image at a tiny 10x10 so I can't even do something mean like replace the image with a big nasty note.

My polite email got a swift response and they removed the image. Apparently this forum allows users to enter arbitrary image URLs; weird. Anyway, what a nuisance. Transclusion is complicated.
techbad
  2004-11-12 18:44 Z