[Foundation-l] discussion about banning external hotlinking

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 2:19 PM, Simetrical
<Simetrical+wikilist at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 12:20 PM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
>> One click vs.. I don't agree that it's at all comparable
>
> Well, in neither case is it obvious that the credits are even
> available at all, and I think that's the important similarity.  But
> that's neither here nor there.  If we're okay with the image merely
> linking to the image page on Wikipedia, it should be okay for hotlinks
> too.

I'm not sure we can have a reasonable discussion on this point.  So
I'll drop it for now.

[snip]
> You mean, it doesn't continue if we decide to actively (possibly at a
> hit to performance) go out of our way to try to filter out those
> images.  And even then it still probably continues, just people have
> to reupload it somewhere -- without *any* ability for the interested
> viewer to track where it's from, tech-savvy or not.

Possibly at a hit to performance. Come now.  The CPU on the squids are
loafing, applying a couple of regexpes to allow some specific sites
would not be a hit worth mentioning. (and if it is, it would just be
something else to fix in squid...)

So don't feed me that crap. ;)  Besides, as I pointed out.. I'd rather
not disable it.

>> Cool. 'nuff.  You might want to hunt down mangus little JS example. I
>> can't find it at the moment, but the user interface was pretty
>> reasonable as I recall.
>
> Is there any problem with something that just looks like Flickr?
> Actually, I don't see any interface for this on Flickr -- say
> ImageShack, then?
>
> Where should the instructions be put, right under the image?
>
> Do we have agreement that we actually want this?  It's rather a big
> leap in the opposite direction from the OP.  :)

This was the JS hack I was talking about:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:African_penguins.jpg?withJS=MediaWiki:ChooseResolution.js
 (helps to spell Magnus' name right!)

Looks like it's not working quite right anymore.  The 'use on your
webpage' link popped up a box with HTML that you could copy and paste.
  I think the flickr style size links on top is preferable ... less
likely to get missed.