Let me explain. According to my service provider, requests is the total number of items that your machine asks for when you visit fourhman.com. Each graphic, each cgi, each html counts as a separate request. A pageview is the more commonly used unit of measure, a one-for-one relationship: one page, one pageview. So you looking at this page counts me one pageview and about thirty requests.

In March, my requests shot up to crazy levels, well out of line with the progression from previous months. Further research showed that a goodly portion of that number was caused by people linking to graphics contained here. Since they're simply linking to a graphic contained on my site, it counts as a request, not as a pageview. And that adds up to increased bandwidth in and out of fourhman.com that I could conceivably have to pay for, without the users ever actually visiting the actual site.

The key abuser is message boards that allow graphic avatars. Since lots of folks don't have their own webspace, they just ID one of my graphics as their avatar. So every time they post a message, or anytime anybody reads a message they're posted, I get hit with the requests bill.

That's my problem... the potential for losing money. I don't care at all about people using my graphics, if they download them and store them someplace else. Hell, this is the internet. It's a users' market. In fact, one of the most commonly stolen fourhman.com images isn't even relevant to fourhman.com. It's a picture of Homestar Runner, as shown on my link farm (a page I routinely ignore and ought to just destroy someday if I didn't rely on it for bookmarking.)

Here is the original:

Since people are linking directly to that image, I can freely change it to whatever I want, and the "new" image will instantly appear in their message boards. My first thought was to do something totally crude like "I LIEK TEH BUTTSEX," but I decided to play it political...

I went back to watch this icon appear in message boards around the world and it occurred to me: these people probably are against the war. Some of the biggest bandwidth stealers were on German and Canadian websites. I didn't want to go the route of a big Saddam head with the text "I LUV KILLING AMERICANS" (although I reserve the right to do so in the future), so I settled on some free advertising.

Now that's bandwidth theft that might actually pay off for me! But don't think I'm done, because as I see this sort of thing continue I intend to have more fun with it.

UPDATE 04/01/03: I am also sending this wonderful image out there...

UPDATE AGAIN: One of the guys using that ol' Homestar image figured out the best way to avoid getting avatars of fat ladies: host the image yourself! Plugo2K, I salute you! Hope you enjoyed the brief mayhem.