Early Modern Notes

… sooner or later, I suppose. Which is not to say that I’m not really pissed off about it.

It occurred to me, for the first time in far too long, to take a look at my site statistics this morning. Well, there was some good news. EMN got over 6000 hits in August (so perhaps I’m doing something right).

But what’s top of the hit list? A single image from one of my EMR pages (Women’s lives in the British Civil Wars). And we’re talking heavy usage by EMR standards: 8000+ hits in August - 14% of the total for the site. Uh-oh.

Now if I tell you that this image is titled ‘colchester’ and on scrolling down a little further I find that my top referring site is the Colchester United Football Club supporters’ message boards, does the penny start to drop?

Unfortunately that link doesn’t take me directly to the threads in which the image must be appearing (and you know what? I couldn’t be bothered to investigate further): but my deduction is that some bloody poster (or even posters) to the message boards has taken the liberty of using my image, directly accessed from my server, as a signature logo for their posts. I can’t see how anything else would produce such heavy use, unless anyone has any bright ideas. As I say, I’m not wasting my time looking.

This is not merely rude; it’s theft. I’m not talking intellectual property or anything abstract here. I’m talking about my bandwidth, which I pay for. OK, I’m nowhere near my bandwidth limits and it’s a tiddly .gif, but it’s the principle of the thing. I probably wouldn’t mind an image being used this way for, say, a teacher’s course resources that would be used by a relatively limited number of people, for an educational purpose. But this is something else altogether.

What should I do about it? In fact, what I’ve done for the time being is simple but drastic (and rather frustrating): I’ve deleted the image from the server. It’s only one picture out of several on the page, hardly crucial to the effect, and I have at least got some pleasure out of imagining the surprise someone will be getting. I’d like to put it back at some point under a different filename, but I’m worried they’ll just find it and do the same thing again. (In which case, I’m thinking I might re-rename it and then make an image with a rude message for the URL they’re accessing, but maybe I shouldn’t give in to such a childish impulse…) I don’t know whether it would be worth contacting the moderators of the message boards. I’d be grateful for advice from anyone who’s experienced this.

Update: In response to Ancarett’s suggestion, the colchester.gif is now a little message saying ‘Host your own images!’ (takes up less than a KB), and the original image has been renamed. Now I can only wait and see if this person does it again… I really must be more conscientious about checking the site stats in future!