Tracking down direct links

[dewmuw]

I was surprised when browsing my pbase site to see that one of my shots has 33 direct links since December 2003. I cannot recall linking to any other sites and am worried that the image might be being used by others.

Is there anyway of tracking down where and when these links were made?

[CyberDyneSystems]

Only if Pbase will display the IP of the linking...

33 is not a lot though.. if you had posted the image here... I am sure you'd get 33 easily..

I have a few images that have generated close to 20,000 hits... :shock: this is clearly the result of some serious embedding in multiple sites. maybe even being shared in newsgroups??... :shock:

Anyway.. fotopic,.. where the images are hosted, has a maintanance page that tells me the IP's of who is hitting the images.. I would think Pbase does as well.

[maderito]

On the PBase Forum, people ask about tracing direct links so often that the question often goes unanswered.

Currently, direct links to a PBase image can't be traced. Here's more info (http://www.srijith.net/pbasefaq/index.php?sid=14714&aktion=artikel&rubrik=002&id=7 &lang=en) from the unofficial PBase FAQ.

[dewmuw]

Thanks guys - I appreciate the help.

[Scottes]

I'm not sure what you mean by "direct links" exactly... But to possibly alleviate your concerns...

When someone views a topic with one of your images in it the web server will (usually) get hit twice.

Pekka has done some programming to this site to control page width when images are posted. If someone mistakenly posts a 3000x2000 image he doesn't want to blow out the page. By keeping the images limited to 800 wide he keeps control of the formatting of the page being displayed. So if a large image is posted Pekka forces it to display at 800 wide. If an image with an unknown size is posted Pekka forces it to display at 500 wide.

For Pekka to do this forced-width controlling stuff he has to know the size of the image. So whenever someone views an image posted here the software here makes a request to the web server to retrieve the image. Once enough of the image is received (ie; once the image width is known) Pekka's software drops the connection to the web server. But now that the image width is known this page can be displayed properly, so your browser is given the link to the image with image tags controlling the display size. So now your browser goes out and retrieves the image.

So photography-on-the.net makes a request for the image, and then the person viewing makes a request for the image. So it looks like 2 hits on the image - on from here, and another from anyone viewing your image.


For some reason this doesn't happen every time, though. Checking my web server logs shows 192 hits for a particular image. Of them, 74 were from photography-on-the.net because of Pekka's image width checking stuff. That leaves 118 other hits. But that picture has 120 views here, so that's all about right. I would have thought that Pekka's code would do it query every time someone viewed that post, but I guess not.

[maderito]

I'm not sure what you mean by "direct links" exactly...
In the PBase world, a "direct link" means that a link has been created to your image. PBase keeps track of the number of such links and reports it as part of the image statistics (along with the number of "views"). Only the image poster can examine these statistics - which are given right on the image page. Naturally, people are curious about who linked to their image (if they didn't do it themselves). Having the IP address of the linker would allow you to check it out.

[Scottes]

Interesting. Though I can't see how someone can tell the difference between a direct link and someone right-clicking and choosing "View Image"

Is there some PBase option where a user can click on "Create Direct Link" or something like that? Let alone the difference between 38 people doing it versus 1 person doing it 38 times....

[maderito]

Interesting. Though I can't see how someone can tell the difference between a direct link and someone right-clicking and choosing "View Image"

Is there some PBase option where a user can click on "Create Direct Link" or something like that? Let alone the difference between 38 people doing it versus 1 person doing it 38 times....
Scottes -

You don't create the direct link from within PBase. You create it from another site - like this forum. I don't understand how PBase keeps track of these links.

Here's a discussion thread (http://forum.pbase.com/viewtopic.php?t=1526) from the PBase forum in which someone who does understand direct linking is trying to explain it to everyone else. You're our IT guy -- maybe you can sort it out. :P

[stopbath]

When you click on a link, your browser will send a request to the server hosting the image or page in question. In that request is information like what type of brower it is, and the address of the page holding the link you clicked on. Also included is your ip address.

If you use a favourite or bookmark, type in the address and similar ways to get a link without actually clicking on it, the browser does NOT send the address of the page you got the link from (as it does not know this).

Thus the server knows where the links are to be found that reference the page it is hosting. Normally, it does not keep this information, but using special scripts and stuff, that information can be kept (just for the moment or added to a database for later use.)

A hit counter is an example of saving IP address or not keeping IP addresses. The simplest counters just count hits. More advanced counters keep the last IP address and wait until a new address before counting again (so smacking F5 does not increment the count) Even more advanced counters can display hits per week, month or year....

So yes, it is very simple to know where hits are coming from, but this needs to be set up by the web site designer (if allowed by the server used to host the web site...)

[Scottes]

Yep, I'm with stopbath after reading that thread. I'd say that pBase is counting referrer information - each unique referrer is counted as a direct link. So if 3 sites (like here) have the image embedded in a topic then that counts as 3 direct links. And if someone "steals" your image by posting the PBase link on their web page then that's a 4th direct link. Even if 1,000 people view it on each site.

To count this pBase must be saving the referrer information. Which is easy, though it adds to log file size. But displaying it to end users (ie; PBase account holders) is fairly difficult and would be extremely CPU intensive on a site like PBase. (Like 2 to 4 dual CPU servers with several hundred megs of disk space.) So they don't give the info to end users. But *counting* unique referrers is easy and cheap, so they give you that.

If I'm right, and if I had 38 direct links to one of my images, well, I'd be mighty upset because I'd be thinking that someone was stealing my image and/or my bandwidth.

[dewmuw]

OK here is my concern after reading all that great information.

One of my images has been linked to this site alone and so I would expect to see statistics of "1 direct link". However the statistics state "38 direct links". The other statistic says "378 page views".

Am I being paranoid or is it feasible that the image has been "stolen" and linked to 37 other sites without my authorisation?

[Big_B]

Two thoughts. If someone really wanted to steal an image, wouldn't it be easier to simply save it and then host it on their website?

Secondly, if you are concerned try renaming the file. If a link exists with other websites you'll break their link. If 37 links pop up again you will have stronger grounds for your concern.

[dewmuw]

Two thoughts. If someone really wanted to steal an image, wouldn't it be easier to simply save it and then host it on their website?

Secondly, if you are concerned try renaming the file. If a link exists with other websites you'll break their link. If 37 links pop up again you will have stronger grounds for your concern.

Good idea - I'd never have thought of that! Such a simple solution too!

[Big_B]

Two thoughts. If someone really wanted to steal an image, wouldn't it be easier to simply save it and then host it on their website?

Secondly, if you are concerned try renaming the file. If a link exists with other websites you'll break their link. If 37 links pop up again you will have stronger grounds for your concern.

Good idea - I'd never have thought of that! Such a simple solution too!

:oops: :oops:

[Scottes]

Two thoughts. If someone really wanted to steal an image, wouldn't it be easier to simply save it and then host it on their website?

There is also a problem with stealing bandwith. Many people have free websites on hosts that limit their bandwidth. So these people put in links to your image on your webserver. The image appears to be on their website but someone browsing will download from your website.


Years ago my wife made a website for information for a game she was playing at the time. Both of us created many, many images for the site based on graphics in the game. The site was extremely popular - especially the unique graphics which people started "stealing" as I described above. I wrote a script which randomly renamed almost every graphic on the site and updated the HTML pages with the new names. The script ran nightly.

Needless to say, the stealing of bandwidth stopped as each image would only last 24 hours at most. But you can never stop people from getting the images themselves.