80% of my smileys stopped working at once...

[Kami]

May 24, 2020 3:23:32 GMT -8 divebitch said:

May 23, 2020 19:50:54 GMT -8 Kami said:

No one here will say they did anything because no one did anything. You can't block users from hotlinking images except if you are the one hosting the image. That's just how the internet works. (Mixed content -- which is http on an https page -- may not show images, but this is not a block and rather an overall function of the internet.)

You keep returning to it being too suspicious for your liking that two hosts blocked hotlinking simultaneously, but site administrators can see through analytics where their hits and requests are coming from, you know, so it is entirely within the realm of possibility that both sites saw too many requests from the same external sources and simply removed the option to hotlink.

Hotlinking without permission can cost a website an enormous amount of money--so much money, in fact, that previously free hosts now charge money to host with them, or remain free under the condition you won't use their service to host web graphics for your forum. In extreme cases, free hosts have even completely shut down (for example, tinypic.com).

You can, of course, continue to be skeptical. I don't think there'd be anything we could do to change your mind, if you won't take three people citing the same reasoning.

I believe you. And didn't mean to sound paranoid or victim of a conspiracy or anything. lol Was just trying to troubleshoot, just looking for an answer that I could make sense of. I had no idea how hotlinking costs a website like sherv.net tons of money. Pardon my ignorance, but I mean, what else are they even there for, why do they exist? And the simplest way to use them is to hotlink, no? I've never seen any instructions or requests on their sites to not hotlink, and upload instead. Anyway, IDK that that could work. Not as PC savvy as I could be perhaps. We've already ruled out the mixed content being the issue. Maybe stick to the sites that still work. Smilies will be more limited. So be it.

Anyway, thank y'all again. Maybe look into this themes thing. Never gone there before.

I can't speak as to why this site specifically exists (I've never heard of it), but generally speaking these kind of sites are made with the assumption -- and terms of service/usage -- that you will save the images to your PC and reupload them to your own host. Yes, the easiest way to use something is to hotlink. But doing so on sites that aren't set up to allow it costs money. Hosting packages have bandwidth limits (the amount of connection requests that can be made at once) unless you opt for the expensive tiers that have unlimited bandwidth; every request counts against that limit, so by hotlinking (especially on ad supported websites) you are effectively stealing bandwidth and costing that site money.

Ever heard of Photobucket? In the 90s and 00s it was the most popular free image host. They had paid for packages, but most people simply used the free options. There were minimal ads, and they allowed users to hotlink any hosted image with a bandwidth limit (I think it was something like a few gigabytes of data per month per account). Over time, the ads became more and more obnoxious because the company was losing money due to the hotlinking (meaning most users never visited the website proper and therefore never saw their ads, which means Photobucket lost out on ad revenue that would support their free service) and so being ad-supported the ads became more plentiful, obtrusive, and obnoxious--especially once ad blocker use became popular. In the late 2010s, they abruptly shut down and returned with a pay for model, blocking ANY user (even if they already had accounts) from accessing their content unless they paid their subscription fee. Even after some modifications to the pricing model due to public outrage, you still need an expensive tier of subscription to be able to hotlink to offset the cost they accrue by allowing it.

I had a quick look at sherv.net's page on emoticons, and the language there is pretty explicit about their terms: the emoticons are free to download for personal use. Hotlinking violates this agreement, so it comes as no surprise to me that they blocked hotlinking — the images are still available when accessing the website proper or simply looking at the image by directly accessing the URL, but can no longer be embedded onto other sites.