I Knew DivX Was Evil...

[sisabet]

Pretty pissed about this - divx.com is direct linking to every single video on our site. Permission was never once asked or granted by me, Dawn or Lum. This is ultra-annoying. Also - I'm late for work.


http://search.divx.com/search.php?r=10&s=r&zd=l&z=&dd=l&d=&du=s&v=0+0&t=1&a=1&n=0&q=headtilt&submit=Search

Comments

[luminosity]

WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS?

[luminosity]

PS. Isn't there some sort of meta tag we can use?

Is there an address we can contact them at?

[lildhampir.livejournal.com]

God this pisses me off. The amount of time and effort you guys put into your vids, only to have them being either 1-stolen and claimed to be done by others or 2-linked to your site to run up your bandwidth. It's offensive and if there is anything I can do to try and help you with the situation, just let me know.

[sisabet.livejournal.com]

I Know!!! I have no earthly idea what is going on.

[sisabet.livejournal.com]

I think so - Dawn was talking about something like that this morning but I couldn't really understand her and I was late for work.

Re: Is there an address we can contact them at?

[sisabet.livejournal.com]

I'm fairly nervous about these people - I really want to be under their radar and no attention called. We will see.

Understood but if you do decide you want to react...

[lildhampir.livejournal.com]

I have your back :) BTW, I can't listen to bring me back to life without busting into giggles rotfl. Thanks. I knew there was reason I refused to watch Daredevil.

[vrya.livejournal.com]

Yikes!

your probably want to have a look at: http://www.divx.com/movies/searchfaq.php#f11

Even google's image search links to the *page* the image is displayed on, not to the image itself. How tacky to display a direct link like that. Bad search engine, bad!

Off to add to my robots.txt file!

[sisabet.livejournal.com]

Thank You - I was a bit freaked and out of time this morning - I'll speed this info over to Dawn right away.

[vrya.livejournal.com]

you're welcome. panic mode is fun, huh? good luck getting them to take you out...

[sisabet.livejournal.com]

Yes! Vrya just got that info to us and I just forwarded it to Dawn.

[luminosity]

Great. I think Kamil must already have a meta tag up because Eyecandy isn't up there. I put in a search for "Lum" and "Luminosity," and I got a lot of porn. Why am I not surprised? No vids though.

[heresluck]

Do you run your own server? My impression is that those of us renting space can't use robots.txt, or rather we can but it doesn't do a damn thing. Am I wrong about this? I've just been using meta-tags, but I'd happily switch -- too many robots don't acknowledge the tags.

[vrya.livejournal.com]

I think all you have to do is put the robots.txt file at the root of the domain, not the root of the server, so as long as you're not stuck with subdomain hosting, it should work... I'm hoping anyway! It can't hurt to have the metatag *and* the robots.txt

I may not like the idea of my vid/audio files being direct-linked, but I don't really care if google indexes my images or whatnot, so I generally don't bother with the metatag/robot exclusions. And my clients always *wanted* to be in as many search engines as possible. So not a whole lot of real-life experience, but those are my impressions ;-)

But, if this turns out to be a long-term issue, I can probably alter my new anti-hotlinking php script to deliver other sorts of media, in which case anyone menaced by media search indexes would be welcome to it...

[sisabet.livejournal.com]

I searched for "eye candy" (nothing) and "superstar" (more porn!) and "come on" (tons o'porn)

It's gotta be the tags.

[heresluck]

You're absolutely right that it can't hurt -- I'll get on that.

I've also thought about doing a simple password protect, where the vid directory is protected and the password's right there on the page but you have to be AT the page to see the password. Not quite to that point, though.

[sisabet.livejournal.com]

That is actually a very good idea.

[heresluck]

And in your case, particularly, it might be a good interim solution until you can get the DivX people to take those links down...

[maniacnun.livejournal.com]

If your website has a control panel where you can check your bandwidth usage, you might check for "hotlink protection." If not, this site has the code for making a hotlink protector file:

http://www.webpimps.com/scripts/htaccess/

I believe you make a regular text file, put in the code they say (your site substituted for their example,) and then save it and rename it .htaccess. You don't have to make a redirect page, but you can specify an html page to send the user to. Like "DIVX.COM are a bunch of thieves, click here for the real link!" ^^ I am not sure if you have to put this file in every directory or not, I guess you have to do trial and error to make sure.

[luna-k.livejournal.com]

I don't get it. I'm totally, totally clueless.

Okay, I know that "hotlinking", or direct linking, is a bad, evil thing that people should not do. But I still don't really understand what it *is* and how people even do it.

And why would a huge ass site with lots o'green like divx.com hotlink, anyways?

[redqueen6238.livejournal.com]

I'm with you. I'm clueless. I checked the site and my videos are also linked from there. I've never had any problems with my host though.

So, um, I know it's bad and evil and wrong. But what does it really *do*?

I'll just put on my dunces cap and sit in the corner.