Is this ethical ?

DomainSage · #1 (**permalink**) 08-12-2006, 06:04 AM

Hi folks,

Was not sure which forum to post this in but this seemed the best ( Mods please move if wrong ).

OK, the situation is that I have site allowing visitors to play free flash games.
Like a lot of these sites it shows a short piece of code below each game that users can copy and paste into their own sites, this loads the game from my server and displays a little bar with a link back to me.

The other day I was looking through my stats and something did not quite look right. On further investigation I found a popular games site that had used that code but removed the link back. Also they had published the code for people to copy and paste, however they left it so that the game was loaded from my server, but it inserted a link back to their site. I noticed a lot of peole in MySpace were using that code.

In effect hi jacking my bandwidth and data transfer.

This amounted to about 5Gb of data transfer a day.

So how to deal with this problem ? What I did was change the original swf file on my site. I also created a simple one and named it the same as the original. This just showed as a link back to my site that users could click, so they can play the original game.

If it had just been using a little bandwidth then I would have let it slide, but at 5Gb/day after a week or so I felt I had to do something to stop this getting even worse.

So, was this an OK way to react to the situation ?

If it had just been the one site to deal with ( the original one ) then I would have dropped them an e-mail asking for a link back, but becuase they posted the modified code it has now been spread around a lot of sites ( mostly MySpace ).

Looking forward to your views.

All the best.

Richard

HostEBiz · #2 (**permalink**) 08-29-2006, 09:09 AM

Try and speak with your web hst and see if there was some way you could block access to certain files or directories from outside your doamin. I know that on the cpanel/linux system you have hotlink protection but you need to specify individually which domains can link to files on your website (which might not be practical in your case).

DomainSage · #3 (**permalink**) 08-31-2006, 03:31 AM

Hi HostEBiz,

Thanks for the reply. It is on my own dedicated server and, although it is not an option through the control panel, I can do what you suggested.
The problem is that my site allows anyone to pull the games off my server as long as they provide a link back. As the person that did this was spreading a modified version of the code it is impossible ( without spending hours going through the raw log files ) for me to tell who is using the correct code.
Since writting this they changed it again to reflect my new name for the file, so I changed it again .... Now they are doing exactly the same thing except they are using someone elses site to pull the file from.

All the best.

Richard