Hosting images on puzzling.org
Policy applies to: people hosting websites on puzzling.org
Hosting images is now a potentially enormous bandwidth liability. This is thanks to images.google.com, which makes it easy to find third party images, and the <img> HTML tag, which makes it easy to include other people’s images in your own pages. If you have an image at http://example.puzzling.org/hugeimage.jpg, and someone uses the <img> tag below in their page, then your image in its entirety gets included every time someone views the page, and their browser happily runs off to fetch it from the puzzling.org server:
<img src=”http://example.puzzling.org/hugeimage.jpg”>
In order to prevent most cases of this, please set up a robots.txt file banning all robots from downloading any images you host on your site. This file goes in the root directory of your website (http://something.puzzling.org/robots.txt). Instructions about its format can be found on the Robots Exclusion Standard pages.
You do not need to exclude robots from all parts of your site (ie, you do not need to do Disallow: /) although you are more than welcome to do so if you don’t want Google and other search engines indexing your pages at all. You must however exclude robots from all images, either by banning it from all directories containing images (eg Disallow: /images) or by banning it from individual images (Disallow: /myface.jpg).
Exceptions can be made on request for small images (as a guide, under 50KB) if you have some particular reason to want them seen by Google and other robots. However, if I have evidence that any image on your site has been hotlinked, I reserve the right to both temporarily move the image to a new location, and to instruct the webserver to permanently ignore image requests that seem to have been referred directly from some third party site.
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