Say hello to the Goatse clock...

....let me explain.

I recently wrote about Eon8 - and then the writeup appeared on Digg. Then the rather inventive chap who created the Eon project linked to me. Then Slashdot linked to him. Then Wikipedia linked to everybody, and before you knew it, we had one of those multilink bloodbaths and something like 20,000 visitors splattered across the site - they're still coming thick and fast as my article gets cited in more and more places.

That's great - however...something I can't abide, is bandwidth thievery. I've found a whole boatload of people that are apparently too lazy to host images themselves, and are simply hotlinking my images.

This is a bad thing.

It's even more infuriating when I'm serving up who knows how many hits per hour - especially when most of these people are using free hosting to begin with, for God's sake (Blogspot, Myspace, Geocities etc). What, you can happily cut and paste my entire writeup but can't be bothered hosting the pictures yourself? I get a large amount of traffic anyway, and I also use this site for many other things besides what you see here in this Blog. Every now and again a story I write gains a fair bit of heat, so every ounce of bandwidth is crucial.

With regards the many, many people doing this currently I tried emailing. I tried leaving comments on their site. I even tried ringing one guy up, but to no avail. And I won't even bother going into details over the boob who sent me a wonderfully offensive email demanding I leave "his" images alone.

So, inspired by the Eon8 Project I decided to set up a little "countdown timer" of my own.

The smart thing to do...would be mess around with my .htaccess files, and block people from hotlinking. However, my FTP access is currently messed up due to the traffic influx, I can't stay connected long enough to re-organise a whole bunch of images into different folders and it's Sunday in any case - so pants to that. Given the current situation, I'd rather have some fun at their expense. Sick, twisted fun of an oh-noes variety.

With that in mind, I give you this:

The Goatse Clock.

That's right - in 24 hours, anyone that's hotlinking the images from my Eon writeup will be amazed to find all the pictures of the Eon site have turned into...

Goatse! Tubgirl! Meatspin! Lemonparty! Cleveland Steamer!

...and probably more besides. You can read about the whole gang here. Well, most of them. You migth have to search for a Cleveland Steamer separately, but on reflection, I don't think you'd actually want to.

At the moment, anyone hotlinking them has the below warning message sitting loud and proud on their website:

...I think I'm being pretty lenient on them, considering what was originally going to be put up there.

So, the timer is ticking down - now if you'll excuse me, I have to go create the best damn slideshow of images you'll ever (hope not to) see.

Best. Day. Ever.


/ Update - Well, it didn't take long. Shortly after the above image started appearing on websites all over the Interweb, my hotlinked images started mysteriously vanishing. There's still quite a lot of them out there, but things like this take time, right?

The heat is now...officially.....on.