This week I posted new pictures from a convention I attended and my bandwidth soared. Soared as in more requests in one day than any 2 or 3 previous months combined. I was excited because a very popular site had linked to mine and I was getting a lot of referrals.

I looked at my access logs, just to be sure everything was kosher. Mostly it was but I found that someone used Front Page to steal my pages. There's a reason I make it difficult to save the big images from my site.

I spend quite a bit of money on tickets, travel, camera, computer, image software, and web space. I spend countless hours correcting, rearranging, commenting, and assembling the photo albums. I want people to enjoy the pics but I'm not the personal photographer for any and every one. Especially those who don't say, "hi," or even, "thanks." I'm an inveterate lurker and heaven knows I've saved a ton of pics for private use from sites I've visited. The thumbnail pics are available to be saved from my site.

I've never refused to share a picture with anyone who e-mailed me to ask. In fact, I've met some very nice people that way. So...why am I pissed?

Using software to automate ripping off a site that has clearly indicated it doesn't want you to do so (hence the message that popped up when you tried to right-click save) is rude and hogs a bunch of my bandwidth. Hell, my photos aren't that uniformly good. I'm sure the person didn't want all of those pics; many of them are marginal. Much better pics of the actors are available on the web without stealing.

I've banned that person's IP addresses. I've reconfigured my htaccess file to refuse downloads to all sorts of miscreants in the future. For the long term, I've consulted Webmaster World and I will soon have a trap set to catch both spiders that ignore the robots.txt and people who attempt to download my site, booting them out of the site and automatically banning them.