zlacker

>>miiiii+(OP)
It was interesting seeing all the image hosts in the old days. ImageShack, PhotoBucket, etc

They'd either die because they couldn't afford the server bills or die because they went commercial. Some left gaping holes in forums etc when they changed.

>>bluedi+9b
What was really funny was people image leaching off of blogs and personal sites and the owners replacing the image based on the referral header to troll the forum users.

>>morkal+Wg
Yep, I did this. I had some art I’d made posted on my blog, and several somebodies liked it enough to make it the background of their MySpace page and use it as forum avatars/signatures. Pretty sure I saw a couple people using it in eBay listings too.

What made it bad is that they were using the full high resolution originals, not the thumbnails, which ate bandwidth like crazy.

So I did the referrer-based leech protection and started serving those users a tiny fake error dialog image, which was much more tame than what some people used. It’s funny how quickly those people stopped embedding, even without the image being anything shocking or objectionable.