Good Bye Cruel Hotlinks.
As of last night, you cannot display images in your dKos diaries or comments, unless those images come from one of the "pre-approved" sites:
- imageshack.us
- photobucket.com
- flickr.com
- dailykos.com
As far as I know, only admins can host anything on dailykos.com so that leaves three commercial hosting sites for the average Kog to use.
Wild speculation and conspiracy theories on the flip side...
The basic idea to limit how and where images can be hosted for display on dKos is a good one.
Backgrounder 1: "Hotlinking" by users has long been an issue on the Daily Kos and could create possible copyright problems. At least as bad is that hotlinking to other sites generates a lot of traffic to those sites, and often this is a big surprise to the site owner. All those extra "hits" can create higher hosting costs for them and, since most people link only to an image and don't include the URL to the website itself, the owner gets very little value out of the additional traffic. Markos has told us several times that hotlinking is not allowed here, and at least once called it a "bannable offense." Still, many many Kogs continued to hotlink to images and I've never heard about anyone being banned for it.
Backgrounder 2, How we found about this change: It's pretty funny, really. dmsilev asked in last night's Open Thread if anyone else had trouble posting hosted images. We kind of puzzled our way through it guessing, mostly correctly, what happened. The funny part is, when you try to post an incorrectly linked image you get an error message that says:
Your HTML has the following errors :
* http://whateveryoujustposted.com is not from an approved image host. See the FAQ for details.
Heh.
Heh, heh heh. So, the first person to get this error message and then wonder what the heck is going on is the author of the FAQ!! You gotta' love it. By the way, a big hat tip to dmsilev, who has already fixed that FAQ entry. That cat is amazing. We all owe him some thanks.
For me, this is almost part of the charm of this place. Make changes, don't tell anyone before they happen, see if we're smart enough to figure it out. With any luck the FAQ guy will catch it after awhile and write something up before too many people lose their minds. What I find charming, however, may be confusing or even exasperating to other users, especially newer or more occasional visitors.
There has been a little bit of confusion already this morning. Saturday Morning Garden Blogging had a couple people scratching their heads, and Jeffrey Feldman had to add some disclaimers to his diary about "possible copyright violations" that were nothing of the sort. He since fixed his diary by moving all of his images to a Flickr site.
There's also been a little more Open Threading on the subject this morning, but no official announcements or explanations from Markos or Jeremy to my knowledge. I waited all night and most of the morning before posting this in case management wanted to tell us worker bees about the new water cooler policy.
Overall, I think the change is a postive one. It eliminates the hotlinking part of the problem and will no doubt curb many of the copyrighted image violations (although I've seen a fair number of potentially copyrighted images "copied" to personal photobucket, et. al. accounts which wouldn't necessarily be caught by the new technical changes). It will for sure reduce the sheer number of displayed images which will, in turn, reduce diary and comment loading times and overall load on the dKos servers.
At the same time it will inconvenience some users who post legitimate images from their own sites or who host images at sites under their control. Many of these people would like to continue doing that, and at this writing, it's pure speculation as to whether that would be allowed eventually. Fly has a particularly interesting suggestion for doing this, imho.
A few other ideas bandied about include allowing users to host their own images on dailykos.com, perhaps restricting the size and bandwidth of such files. A related idea is to allow this privilege only for paid Daily Kos subscribers which might have the additional benefit of increasing the subscriber base. A third option would be to allow people to submit their own sites and get CT or Markos to "qualify" them as legitimate additions to the "Approved List." This is, or course, all wild speculation and anarchistic brainstorming in the absence of guidance from above.
OK, so I didn't come up with any Conspiracy Theories. Maybe you can add a few in the comments. What do you think?
[Updated: 1:40pm CDT] I added a link to one of Markos's warnings about hotlinking near the top of the main body of the diary and removed a few typoes. Also, the system generated error message has been changed by CT to include the list of the accepted sites and now reads:
Your HTML has the following error :
* http://www.fakesite.com/image.jpg is not from an approved image host. The approved domains are: imageshack.us, photobucket.com, flickr.com.
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