Deep linker

Sorry if this is a stupid question, but what exactly is the problem with deep linking? Perhaps I’m not sure what exactly it is. Isn’t it just having a link directly to a specific post/page in a site? I know that on several occasions on this board I’ve posted links directly to Alex King’s tasks software. Is this considered deep linking? And why is it bad? Please understand, I’m not trying to be a troll or start a flame war here. I really don’t understand the issue(s) involved with this.

Eudaimic actually used the wrong term. “Deep linking” is when you link to a page other than the front page of a site. In my opinion there’s no problem with this. If I remember correctly The Onion didn’t want people linking to individual stories for a while and it caused a fuss.
What Eudaimic is talking about is probably more correctly called “hot linking” which is where you embed an object from someone else’s site on your page. The obvious problem with this is you’re stealing someone else’s bandwidth, which isn’t free. So if you put an image in a post and the image itself was on someone else’s server then every time someone loaded your page then it would pull the image from the other person’s server, effectively stealing their bandwidth for your use.
It can seem a little confusion because of the ambiguity in the word “link.” Basically, if you point to someone else’s site there shouldn’t be problems, but if you embed a file from someone else’s site on yours without permission then you’re in the wrong.

I know sites that have gone to great lengths to make ‘deep linking’ possible. Cena, your links are just fine (although you can use https://www.alexking.org/software/tasks/ if you care about brevity). I hadn’t heard the term “hot linking” before – learned my new thing for the day. ??

Oh yes hotlinking is very bad. I had some people hotlinking off my site a few times. The best thing to do I found is do a redirect if someone is trying to hotlink and not allowed to. Well mainly for image files.

Hotlinking is rampant on forums. I used to run a very busy forum and because you’re getting thousands of impressions a day. It only takes one active poster to hotlink in his signature and someone is really having the bandwidth leached off them.
On more than one occasion we had complaints from people who’d used GB’s in a couple of days because someone decided to put a flash video in their signature or something. And we did get a few people who did the old “gay porn” trick of exchanging whatever was being leached to some dodgy photos…it does tend to discourage future hot-linking!!
I used to offer free hosting of signatures to forum members just to keep the forum out of trouble with sites people were hotlinking from!!

.htaccess solved my problem swiftly and efficiently ??
The problem is that often these kids (and that’s what I think most of them are) don’t see it as wrong… probably because they don’t pay for it!

Actually WordPress is going to do some hotlinking in the future… ??
Once we have more themes in place we’ll be in the position where you can change the entire look and layout of your blog by just changing one file, the CSS. To allow people to test drive the different themes I plan to host them on www.remarpro.com so you could try out a theme just by putting the URI to the www.remarpro.com hosted CSS file and images. Then if you liked it you could download the theme to your server.
To prevent people from just being lazy or running everything off our site, the URLs for the images and CSS files will change every other hour or so. Now all we need is some themes…

Great idea, allusion! And while we’re on the subject of ‘neat ideas’, is there any possibility you’ll release the code running the ‘zeitgeist’/jazz quotes sections of your site?

Cool.
That is of course until someone, just to spite you, makes a parser that graps the current URI for the theme whenever it’s loaded ??

I think we might be better off just having all of the themes available for testing on the dev-blog or a sample blog page or something like that (and not allowing remote usage).

Yep let people see how it looks on a sample page and then copy the css to their server if they want to use it.
However that will mean a bias to blogs looking the same. I haven’t worked out how to get the default index.php to render in a nested float or 3 column layout using CSS yet. There many design choices influenced by the positioning the Div’s

If anyone abuses the service it’s pretty trivial to set up something to automatically block requests from bad.example.com. Not something I’m worried about.

You know hot-linking exists, although you`ve never heard the term before. If you put a hot picture or video on your site, you can expect that some-one probably would hot-link it, why should you use your own bandwidth if some-else can do it for you

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