PBase question - please help

[dewmuw]

Would you say it was unusual to have 24 direct links to a photo on pbase that I know I have only linked to this site myself?

Am I being paranoid or is it possible other people are linking it?

[sdommin]

I would say that, yes, it is very unusual. There should be a way to find out. I thought that only registered members could link to only their own pictures, but I guess that's not true.

[thomascanty]

I thought that only registered members could link to only their own pictures, but I guess that's not true.

Pbase has no way of knowing who created the link. You have to be a registered member to link to your images, but once you're registered, anyone can link to them... And you're right, 24 direct links does sound very strange.

Have you tried using that Pbase Backup utility, dewmuw? That works by directly accessing each of your images in order to download them for a backup, so it would increase the number of links you see for that image, especially if you've run it several times. It would do that for ALL of your images, though. Not just that one.

[MT]

This blurb from their faq would indicate that direct link counters should understate the number.

** the direct link count on image pages is essentially meaningless. it is only incremented once the first time it's linked to. after that it's served from caching servers which makes accurate counting difficult. sorry about that. in the future this may be able to be fixed.

http://www.pbase.com/help/hit_counters

That said, I've got an image that shows 625 direct links - and I can't imagine that it is linked that many time.

http://www.pbase.com/billcarter/image/33798915

So I'm guessing that the tracking is imperfect - although the intent is to show how many times the images is displayed with direct links rather than the number of sites actually linking the image.

[dewmuw]

Thanks guys. I just changed the name of the pic so if someone was linking it the link is now, hopefully, broken.

I don't object to people linking if they ask me!

[robertwgross]

I don't object to people linking if they ask me!

I had inquiries coming from all kinds of strangers about some of my images that they had seen on some other web sites. Hmmm.

I tracked it down and found that other sites had "grabbed" my images and had everything linked without my permission. Needless to say, I shut that down. I inquired back to the renegade webmasters why they had done it without my permission, and their attitude was that they can do whatever they want as long as it is not illegal. I told them that if they had simply asked for permission, I might have granted it to them, since I had granted permission to others. But, since they did not ask for permission, I shut it down and renamed files.

---Bob Gross---