House of your dreams??? or not...

lynnma · January 30, 2015

I think this has finally fallen down... old haunted house in Maine...

Stumblebum · January 30, 2015

Nice shot and nice processing!

lynnma · January 30, 2015

Stumblebum wrote: »

Nice shot and nice processing!

thanks

black mamba · January 30, 2015

Now that's my kind of place. Looks to have been quite a grand home at one time. You wonder what led to its demise.

Nice shot,

Tom

Sam · January 30, 2015

Love it.

Now for the bad news: You image has been snatched and shown on Admin Edit: Blog thief's site link removed by Dgrin forum administrators and moderators.

See this previous thread for a more complete explanation.

http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=250553&page=3

Sam

The Lazy Destroyer · January 30, 2015

Great shot, seeing an amazing house like this in such abandonment is both beautiful and sad at the same time.

lynnma · January 31, 2015

Sam wrote: »

Love it.

Now for the bad news: You image has been snatched and shown on blogspot.

See this previous thread for a more complete explanation.

http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=250553&page=3

Sam

hmmm thanks sam... now what?

DonRicklin · January 31, 2015

Great stuff! If I could be there I'd probably take a thousand images or so, everywhere I could get.

Don

rwells · February 2, 2015

lynnma wrote: »

hmmm thanks sam... now what?

Evidently most of us have had our images stolen and posted on that blog. Due to Dgrin being the harvest spot, I feel they might want to flex their muscles here to get this resolved before members just quit posting on Dgrin for this reason.

lynnma · February 2, 2015

Yes if you look at the blog site there are so many, actually.. most are from Dgrin. I certainly am a bit leary of what I post now knowing it's going up into blogspot.
they just have no shame.:bluduh

denisegoldberg · February 2, 2015

lynnma wrote: »

Yes if you look at the blog site there are so many, actually.. most are from Dgrin. I certainly am a bit leary of what I post now knowing it's going up into xxxx://visionxmobile dot blogspot dot com/
they just have no shame.:bluduh

Please don't quote the blog's URL here - that's an inbound link to the site that drives more visits and revenue for it.
I think that's the opposite of what you intended.

--- Denise

lynnma · February 2, 2015

denisegoldberg wrote: »

Please don't quote the blog's URL here - that's an inbound link to the site that drives more visits and revenue for it.
I think that's the opposite of what you intended.

--- Denise

Sorry Denise... it absolutely was not what I was intending.. my excuse? um... dotage

denisegoldberg · February 2, 2015

lynnma wrote: »

Sorry Denise... it absolutely was not what I was intending.. my excuse? um... dotage

No excuse needed, and I figured that wasn't what you intended!
It's infuriating that the posts and images are being stolen. Hopefully the site won't live too long.

--- Denise

Brigster · February 4, 2015

Hi all! I'm new here and was reading about this whole mess. When I looked at the source code on that site, it appears that they are running the actual links to the photos here through one of those sites that shortens URL's. The photos then are showing on the rogue site by being hot-linked from here. It is very possible and quite easy to block external sites from hot-linking photos by tweaking a setting on the server side here. I've had to do this on one of my servers when another site was stealing my bandwidth by hot-linking to some of my photos. In my case, the rogue had created thumbnails of my originals that linked to the larger copies, but now visitors clicking on those thumbnails only get my custom written error code and no view of the photo at all.

It's also quite likely that that the rogue site is running some kind of script to 'screen scrape' the content here and such activity should be detectable in the server logs here. The logs will show the IP address of the offender and the IP can then be banned from accessing this site at all.

If the mods or admins here have access to the webmaster for dgrin, perhaps they could pass this info along. My own servers are running CPanel, but all hosting packages are likely to contain similar security options. There's no reason at all for the users here to suffer through this crap, especially in light of Google's failure to act responsibly.

rwells · February 4, 2015

Brigster wrote: »

Hi all! I'm new here and was reading about this whole mess. When I looked at the source code on that site, it appears that they are running the actual links to the photos here through one of those sites that shortens URL's. The photos then are showing on the rogue site by being hot-linked from here. It is very possible and quite easy to block external sites from hot-linking photos by tweaking a setting on the server side here. I've had to do this on one of my servers when another site was stealing my bandwidth by hot-linking to some of my photos. In my case, the rogue had created thumbnails of my originals that linked to the larger copies, but now visitors clicking on those thumbnails only get my custom written error code and no view of the photo at all.

It's also quite likely that that the rogue site is running some kind of script to 'screen scrape' the content here and such activity should be detectable in the server logs here. The logs will show the IP address of the offender and the IP can then be banned from accessing this site at all.

If the mods or admins here have access to the webmaster for dgrin, perhaps they could pass this info along. My own servers are running CPanel, but all hosting packages are likely to contain similar security options. There's no reason at all for the users here to suffer through this crap, especially in light of Google's failure to act responsibly.

Thank you for taking the time and effort to look into this bad situation.
Seems as though some around here think it's virtually impossible to stop this theft. Your solutions sound valid to me.

Main issue: SmugMug is not engaged to even acknowledge this constant image theft is of enough importance to deal with.

I hope they take you up on your offer.

At least I thank you!

kdog · February 5, 2015

Brigster wrote: »

Hi all! I'm new here and was reading about this whole mess. When I looked at the source code on that site, it appears that they are running the actual links to the photos here through one of those sites that shortens URL's. The photos then are showing on the rogue site by being hot-linked from here. It is very possible and quite easy to block external sites from hot-linking photos by tweaking a setting on the server side here. I've had to do this on one of my servers when another site was stealing my bandwidth by hot-linking to some of my photos. In my case, the rogue had created thumbnails of my originals that linked to the larger copies, but now visitors clicking on those thumbnails only get my custom written error code and no view of the photo at all.

I don't believe that addresses the problem. That would only work for images hosted on Dgrin. However, the vast majority of images posted on Dgrin are hot-linked from image servers such as Smugmug, Flickr, etc. Image servers can't block hot-links without killing Dgrin as well, and there's nothing Dgrin can do about other servers using the same image links.

Brigster · February 6, 2015

Ah, true enough about the hot-link protection -I hadn't thought about the way the images are already linked here from other places. However, they could still determine the IP address of the rogue easily enough from the server logs and prevent access. It does seem like the dgrin management just doesn't seem to care enough to do anything about it. Oh, well.

kdog · February 6, 2015

Brigster wrote: »

Ah, true enough about the hot-link protection -I hadn't thought about the way the images are already linked here from other places. However, they could still determine the IP address of the rogue easily enough from the server logs and prevent access. It does seem like the dgrin management just doesn't seem to care enough to do anything about it. Oh, well.

Actually, a change has been made that appears to have stopped them dead.

House of your dreams??? or not...

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