Biking to a lemon party

July 23, 2005 9:50 PM

Is anyone else having, ahem, a problem (to be euphamistic) with the links on this FPP?
posted by oddman to MetaFilter-Related at 9:50 PM (29 comments total)

Apparently, hotlinking sucks.
posted by mr_crash_davis at 9:52 PM on July 23, 2005

Golly!
posted by yodelingisfun at 9:55 PM on July 23, 2005

At least there was nothing there with the g**tse guy.
posted by clevershark at 10:23 PM on July 23, 2005

I know I am...

To me this looks like some guy moving a bunch of furnature using his bicycle.
posted by Balisong at 10:24 PM on July 23, 2005

Okay, serious (if stupid) question: how does this kind of redirection work? Once I had pasted in the URLs fandango_matt put in the comments, even the initial links took me to the bike-mover guy instead of the gay-geezer-porn. Whuzza?
posted by trip and a half at 10:31 PM on July 23, 2005

WHAT THE FUCK FANDANGO_MATT?
posted by knave at 10:31 PM on July 23, 2005

Okay, never mind. nanojath explains all on the blue.
posted by trip and a half at 10:35 PM on July 23, 2005

trip and a half - I'm not how this works for certain 'cause I'm no coder. I assume that in some way you can detect whether a link to the image in question is originating from an outside domain. I'd be interested to hear someone who understands these things explain how it's done.
posted by nanojath at 10:57 PM on July 23, 2005

So this bicycle, it vibrates?
posted by Pseudonumb at 11:01 PM on July 23, 2005

Thanks, nanojath. And I suspect you are correct, but then I'd like to reinstate the question: how exactly is this done? Why did the links in the original FPP take me to the old guy porn, but after I had manually pasted URLs into the browser, why did the same click take me to the bike-guy pics?

I pasted them one at a time, by the way, and after I had pasted the first one (but before I had pasted the second one), the first link was now bike-guy and the second link was still oh-so-gross.

(I am a coder, but I don't do much web stuff. So I'd really like to know how this works.)
posted by trip and a half at 11:18 PM on July 23, 2005

IIRC Apache's mod_rewrite allows you to redirect a request for an image when the referrer is not from your site or another approved site (say, google.com so that your images can be on GIS).

The detection mechanism is just a referrer, though, so if you open a new browser window or tab and paste in the url of the .jpg in question, it'll show up correctly. It's only when the image is directly linked or embedded that it redirects.
posted by Ryvar at 11:22 PM on July 23, 2005

Thanks, Ryvar!
posted by trip and a half at 11:25 PM on July 23, 2005

posted by Ryvar at 11:35 PM on July 23, 2005

Meanwhile, I can't even hotlink something on a web forum without fucking up.
More info.
posted by Ryvar at 11:39 PM on July 23, 2005

btw, welcome back, crash.
posted by crunchland at 11:58 PM on July 23, 2005

And thanks again, Ryvar.
posted by trip and a half at 12:12 AM on July 24, 2005

Those dudes sure throw themselves headlong into the whole moving process.
posted by wakko at 12:33 AM on July 24, 2005

Best links I've seen in a long time. Could've used an [nsfw] tag though.
posted by mosch at 1:02 AM on July 24, 2005

IIRC Apache's mod_rewrite allows you to redirect a request for an image when the referrer is not from your site or another approved site (say, google.com so that your images can be on GIS).

See... here I was thinking perl script that parses path info. I forgot about mod_rewrite! God bless and keep mod_rewrite.
posted by sbutler at 1:22 AM on July 24, 2005

please someone fix the FPP.......prettyprettyplease? I so didn't need to accidently see that. Ugh.
posted by dabitch at 1:45 AM on July 24, 2005

I think they're hot. Look at them! I hope I can still function like that at that age. Though if I keep riding my bike I probably wont.
posted by loquacious at 2:03 AM on July 24, 2005

*giggles*
posted by dabitch at 4:19 AM on July 24, 2005

you know, I usually check the url's preview at the bottom of the browser before clicking on the link, too. A friend of mine has been looking for a Man with a Van lately, to move a couch.

bad link! very bad link! bad for my work, especially.
posted by Busithoth at 7:07 AM on July 24, 2005

Nothing fancy about it; you can do it all in .htaccess with access permissions (I had one set up on a different host denying certain bots and IPs and also disallowing hotlinking to mp3s).

That said, I wonder about the logic behind it: it seems juvenile & disrespectful to show porn instead of a message explaining what behavior is disallowed, and I wonder if it even saves much bandwidth. The webmaster could just simply rewrite his 403 message to spell it out, unless he enjoys shocking people more than stopping the behavior he dislikes.
posted by Tuwa at 7:57 AM on July 24, 2005

I fixed it & left the original link. If something really seriously messed up like this happens, an email to me or Matt might get things straightened out more quickly.
posted by jessamyn at 8:00 AM on July 24, 2005

I fixed it & left the original link. If something really seriously messed up like this happens, an email to me or Matt might get things straightened out more quickly.
posted by jessamyn at 8:00 AM PST on July 24 [!]
Man, I got straightened out a heck of a lot more quickly BEFORE jessamyn fixed the link. Curses.
posted by DeepFriedTwinkies at 10:56 AM on July 24, 2005

A friend of mine has been looking for a Man with a Van lately, to move a couch.

Citimove
posted by mlis at 12:16 PM on July 24, 2005

Citimove

I'm not falling THAT again!



(actually, thanks, I forwarded that on.)
posted by Busithoth at 1:01 PM on July 24, 2005

Jessamyn, thanks for the suggestion. I wasn't sure if there was an established protocol for this sort of thing. I just figure posting in metatalk would grab the right set of eyes.

Hope this wasn't an inappropriate use of metatalk.
posted by oddman at 3:04 PM on July 24, 2005