How to deal with people linking to your site

[giza]

Some of us happen to run websites. Sometimes people link to our websites. Sometimes people even link to images or flash movies on our websites. While most of us think this is a good thing, as it increases our Google Pagerank, it is important that we understand that not everyone likes having their site linked to.

Neoengel shows us one way to deal with that issue.

When someone links to your website and you wish to emulate neoengel, be sure to do all of the following:

- Use lots of foul language

- Scream about how awful furries are

- Act all self-righteous because someone dared link to you

- And, when the person who made the link to your site emails you and apologizes for the incident be sure to post his email and call him a "motherfarker".


So diplomatic. So professional. If only everybody were like him.


But remember kids, it's okay when HE links to other peoples' content [2]. Funny that.

[Edit: triggur points that this "Neoengel" guy stole one of his drawings and copied it to his website. And to think that he's complaining about others "stealing" from him.]

Comments

[jonesybunny.livejournal.com]

I can't help but giggle at such people. But hey, I usually watch on the sidelines. Though, I was tempted to comment there myself with responses like: "Yeah, some things shouldn't be touched with a ten foot pole."

Free for interpretation. >:)

[patchoblack.livejournal.com]

From what I can see, both sides acted poorly. The person who had media on his site linked to had a right to complain, but he went overboard and did so in an unreasonable manner. The person from WikiFur, while apologizing, did so in a rather left-handed way. Sure, he said he was sorry for what happened, but he then seems to suggest that it was partially the other person's fault. Sort of like saying, "Sorry I stole from you, but if you had used better locks, I wouldn't have gotten in, so...". He should have just said he was sorry that the incident happened, explained that sort of thing is not encoraged, and left it at that.

Now, some of the responders to the post are in need of an attitude adjustment...

[giza.livejournal.com]

Well, being a WikiFurry myself, that's generally how we do things on the Wiki -- we are an encyclopedia and removing content is generally frowned upon.

Personally, I think the whole thing could have been avoided if the complaintant had acted a little less like a jerk about the whole thing. His "OMG how DARE you link to my website!" attitude really got things off to a bad start.

[greenreaper.livejournal.com]

I was sorry. It was my entirely my fault that the link was there to start with.

My complaint was how he handled its removal, and it is my belief that he was partially at fault for how that turned out. (Only partially, because, as antagonistic as the edit summaries were, our editors should really have considered things more carefully before reverting his edits.)

[mwalimu.livejournal.com]

Keep in mind that we deal with a lot of vandals on WikiFur - kiddies who think it's fun to mess with articles - and often they are unregistered and their edits have only an IP address, like this guy. The fact that he also took out the Category: tag following the link didn't inspire us with confidence either. For all we knew at the time, he could have been someone else who hated the guy or his website and was trying to remove links the site owner appreciated having. (Obviously that wasn't the case but things like that have happened on Wikipedia.)

[triggur.livejournal.com]

What's even funnier is that-- not even hotlinking-- he fucking outright STOLE my drawing and copied it to his site: http://media.neoengel.com/images/furryspoogebgone.jpg

[giza.livejournal.com]

Oh, that's just super. I edited my post to mention your comment.

Ironically, he was screaming at us on WikiFur about "stealing" from him.

[simbab.livejournal.com]

It was clear to me that he had no intention of playing nice when I read his first commit message, which was to the effect of "Furries don't have permission to link to my site."

[giza.livejournal.com]

It's odd that he seems to look down on us. I mean, this is a guy who goes to science fiction conventions and dresses up like Hulk Hogan (http://neoengel.livejournal.com/66180.html), and is about as weird/unusual as WE are.

[oryx.livejournal.com]

Be careful folks, if he figures out how to craft his hotlinks correctly, he just might STEAL YOUR SOUL!

(And your bandwidth too)

[skippyfox.livejournal.com]

I think the "Pack of cigarettes" treatment applies here. Let's "steal" every possible image, video and flash on that website. :D

[giza.livejournal.com]

Heh, never heard of that term before.

But seriously... let's not. That would definitely fall into the "Not Cool" category.

[hetzakoatl.livejournal.com]

I wonder if there are any furries at Google. :P Then technically Google would be linking his stuff without his permission.

[zeeth_kyrah]

There's one that I know of, and almost certainly more.

[rebelsheart]

I don't remember which website it was, but someoen was trying to remote link an image in their LiveJournal and it wasn't showing up. When support volunteers tried to load the image directly, instead of getting the 100x100 image desired, you get a 20x10000 image making fun of people who hotlink images or try to when a site blocks hotlinking.

*shrugs*

[ionotter.livejournal.com]

Meh. Both sides acted badly.

GR shouldn't have suggested that *he* should change the linking, since it was inappropriately linked to in the first place. Regardless of the removal policy, it should have been at least temporarily removed or pointed to a place-holder until the owner of the article could make changes.

And Neo certainly could have taken some of his own advice, especially chapters 8 and 24. In respect to 24, he wasn't a very good example.

Re: *shrugs*

[giza.livejournal.com]

Articles on WikiFur (and most wikis) do not have "owners" in the traditional sense. They are considered to be "owned" by the community. Now when stuff in an article comes into dispute, we try to get some discussion going and find something that everyone is happy with. This is known as "reaching consensus". We tried that, and he explicitly refused to discuss the matter.

Personally, I find it highly offensive when someone barges into a community and starts making demands of its members.

As for GR, I'll note that at least he tried apologizing. That's more than Neoengel has done.

> And Neo certainly could have taken some of his own advice, especially
> chapters 8 and 24.

Seeing the hypocrisy he has shown so far, I am not surprised.

Re: *shrugs*

[greenreaper.livejournal.com]

Yep. It should have been removed. It wasn't, and that was our fault.

What happened next was up to him, though, and I felt his response was . . . not conductive to a good resolution of the situation. It would literally have been the work of seconds to change the link to one of the three sites publicly hosting the animation, and everyone would have been happy. Instead, he chose to spend half an hour reverting an article and then ten minutes writing a LJ post about it.

Re: *shrugs*

[giza.livejournal.com]

You know, I think this is the first time in recent memory that someone has complained about linking to them. And that's across all my web stuff, not merely WikiFur. I can't help but wonder if it was his intention to start drama all along.

Oh well, note taken in case this ever happens again.

Re: *shrugs*

[greenreaper.livejournal.com]

It would not have been a problem if we were linking to a web page on his website. We were actually linking to a rather large flash file on his website that he had put there as a benefit to readers of his pages. It is as if someone were linking directly to one of the image files on our servers, or to an mp3 download on another person's site. That's generally seen as "bandwidth theft", because it is taking the image without any "benefit" to the host in terms of the user seeing the hosting page.

Artists (for example) tend to dislike other people doing it to them because it means they don't get the opportunity to tempt people with commissions.

Whether he had the right to host it at all is, of course, another question, but it doesn't really matter if just considering the ethics of our own actions in general.

Re: *shrugs*

[greenreaper.livejournal.com]

This is why there are all those (home) links on our list of furry media links (http://furry.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_media_links), and why some of the links aren't quite as direct as they could have been - so that people at least have the opportunity to get a visit out of it.

[gizmo-nine.livejournal.com]

looks like he just wants attention.

[kinkyturtle.livejournal.com]

Oh those damn furries! They can do no right, while Neoengel the Great and his friends can do no wrong! Furries furries furries aaargh! Demons in a world of saints, they are!

[mwalimu.livejournal.com]

I think the guy just didn't want to admit, either to himself or his LJ friends, that he might not have handled the situation the best way. He'd rather just dig in and call us jerks than admit he could have done anything different to forego the result.

One aspect of this whole situation that I find rather amusing is that a couple of favorite sites that are linked from WikiFur have hit counters on them that haven't shown any noticeable traffic increase since getting the links were added. While we have no way of knowing for sure, I'd be willing to bet that the offending link got clicked on well under a hundred times in the less than 4 months it was up. A hundred clicks would be 300M, which spread out over that time period is a barely noticeable amount of bandwidth. He's probably had a lot more bandwidth than that in just the last day and a half from people visiting his site due to this incident.

[irbisgreif.livejournal.com]

oh! indeed!

of course he should get mad!

he now has the taint of "GASP" furry!

*links to him from communist sites too*

There we go, now he can be a болшьевик furry!