Bogus hotlinks infecting PhotoNet posts!

[karl_price]

Following the "What's this" link in the pop up box takes you to a web page that takes you to an e-mail form that requests name, phone, e-mail, etc. I didn't have the heart to follow that one. Enough people know enough about me. Funny how it always requires much of my personal information to get removed from someones list. I believe in signs and I belive I've been spending a little too much time reading the photonet forums.This one was a big mistake Brian.

[socke]

Brian, I do a lot of my work from my home, my employer is sponsoring my internet connection and out of security reasons it is a VPN to the companies servers.

 

Today I had to get photo.net unblocked from the companies firewall, now I know why :-(

[laurie_m]

I truly hope the advertising dollars are worth it.

[bens]

Thanks Karl, did find that form by clicking on the link for "users", but neither the webpage nor the form indicate that contacting them will result in some sort of opt-out. Its just a feedback form. Also, I'm not a user, but a poster being used.

 

Brian, is this what you are referring to? Has Vibrant Media given you assurance that photo.net subscribers filling out such a form will be able to opt out? Is this opt out for all postings by the subscriber or just one particular link? Is the information provided to Vibrant Media maintained by them for any reason other than to allow you to opt out? why do they need anything more than an email address?

[minicucci]

Is this a Windows vs. Mac issue? I'm on a Mac and I cannot see these links. (Safari browser/

10.4.2 OS X)

[mottershead]

I don't think you have fill that form out. I have the link for opting out in my mail, but I have to find it. Perhaps I misremembered and I'm supposed to make that link available. Incidentally, we've been running the Intellitxt links on the site in the Articles sections (Equipment, Travel, Learn) since July 13, and nobody has said a word in over two weeks.

[phule]

<< I guess that's what happens when not enough people pony up the $25 >>

 

If Brian actually treated subscribers with respect instead of hostility by inserting this nonsense into posts, you may have a point.

 

But rather than fix the bandwidth problem and actually place limits on free users, Brian had decided that the only way to solve the problem is to flush photo.net down the toilet by way of ad saturation.

 

The continued hostility towards subscribers is reprehensible.

[bens]

Thanks Brian. Could I ask that you follow up on the opting out procedure in this thread when you find it? I'd really appreciate it.

 

BTW, the 50 dollars I have paid for two years of subscribing in this site is the best investment I have ever made for any interest I have ever had. I really encourage you to attempt periodic subscription drives and the like -- banners peridically, email info alerts with reminders, and to develop international subscription collection procedures, to help boost revenues. It may take some of the pressure off in ways that are easier to accept in the long run.

[Michael R Freeman]

<i>"The links are very distinctive. They are green, and they have a double underline. There are a maximum of five of them per page."</i><P>

 

Sorry Brian, but distinctive or not, and no matter what the limit per page, these are INCREDIBLY OFFENSIVE. You are inserting content in other posters comments/discussions without their consent or knowledge. I certainly don't want my comments to be shilling for some company that I may or may not approve of. How long before "Abe's of Maine" or the like pops up under one of these auto-generated pieces of garbage.<P>

 

I have immensely enjoyed my participation on photo.net over the past few years, in particular the forums. I recently renewed. I will give serious consideration to NOT doing that again when my current subscription expires if this crap remains. I hope this ad revenue will bring in a lot of dollars because I have a feeling you are going to be losing some subscribers if this continues. I realize that subscriber revenue is a small portion of your total revenue, but is it so unimportant to photo.net that you have just decided "to h#@* with them" by sneaking this in under the radar. <P>

 

As for the comment about <i>"send us an email via the Contact Us box, and we will remove the link"</i>, you've got to be kidding, right?! Photo.net inserts content without consent or advance notice in OUR posts and we have to ask that it be removed EVERY time we make a post.

[root]

No, I'm on a Mac with Mozilla and it's all there.

 

I've always thought that the strength of this site was the quality of talent that posted in the forums. Maybe it's a good idea to contaminate the posts in the feedback forums for reasons which are obvious to long time members . . . . . but I can't imagine that this would NOT have a chilling effect on the willingness of serious members to rethink their contributions for reasons that have already been stated.

[minicucci]

Carl:

 

For some reason, Safari does not show the links. I just opened this page with Camino, and

there they were. Three cheers for Safari!

[john_barclay]

Seems like that my post to help out other photo.netters to get rid of ads has been deleted. I understand that photo.net is a private business. So the owner can do what he/she pleases. However, this is a free country and no one owns the Internet, so the next best thing I can suggest is to visit some other sites.... add this:

 

http://*.photo.net/*

 

move alone now, nothing to see here.

[Michael R Freeman]

<i>"Incidentally, we've been running the Intellitxt links on the site in the Articles sections (Equipment, Travel, Learn) since July 13, and nobody has said a word in over two weeks."</i><P>

 

The Articles sections are YOUR content, forum postings are OUR content. There is a *BIG FRIGGIN* difference!

[root]

Patricia, the point isn't so much to shield me from them. As several others have said, it's about contaminating my contributions with misleading distractions.

[socke]

Hm, as I have access to the firewall logs I just looked it up. I saw the links for the first time today.

 

[date/time Report] www.photo.net 4 62K 10.89% 0.00% 100.00% 00:00:04 4K 4.50%

[date/time Report] photo.us.intellitxt.com 9 22K 3.82% 0.00% 100.00% 00:00:04 4K 4.71%

 

they add roughly 30% to my PN related traffic.

 

If PN needs it and blocking the adds is not allowed, I have to visit PN once in a week from an Internet Cafe or something like that :-(

[mottershead]

Volker, if you are just reading forum posts, you are only downloading text. If the IntelliTXT code doubled the amount of text, which is doubtful, it still would be a minor amount of bandwidth.

[jay_blocksom]

<BLOCKQUOTE><I><B>Nick Sanyal, aug 01, 2005; 05:16 p.m.</B>

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Brian said:

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"If anybody objects to the addition of these links to their posts, please send us an email via the Contact Us box, and we will remove the link or delete your posts, as provided in our Terms of Use."

<BLOCKQUOTE>

[snip]

</BLOCKQUOTE>

Seems like the top post does just that!

</I></BLOCKQUOTE>

 

I agree.  But just to be sure all bases were covered, I *also* sent a message including copies of my initial post and one of my follow-up articles via the web-form.  We'll see.

 

<BLOCKQUOTE><I><B>Michael R. Freeman, aug 01, 2005; 05:41 p.m.</B>

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As for the comment about "send us an email via the Contact Us box, and we will remove the link", you've got to be kidding, right?! Photo.net inserts content without consent or advance notice in OUR posts and we have to ask that it be removed EVERY time we make a post.

</I></BLOCKQUOTE>

 

That was not the interpretation of Brian's comment that I made.  But in any event, in the above-noted web-form message, I explicitly made the point that:

<BLOCKQUOTE>

<I>Please note that this "request" is global, retroactive, and made in perpetuity -- IOW, remove ALL auto-generated links from ALL of my articles, and DO NOT add any such links to any future articles I may post.</I>

</BLOCKQUOTE>

 

So again, "we'll see".

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[david_gonzalez]

They seem to have stopped appearing.

[socke]

Brian, bandwith is not a problem at ours, I'm just checking out a 2GB database dump so I can work on it tomorow.

 

The 22Kbyte from intelitxt can't be the two cookies I got from them and as I'm not in the USA they are probably not interested in me.

 

We are concerned about privacy and security of our systems and the question is not if I'm paranoid but if I'm paranoid enough.

 

And then there is the problem that I can't controll the links, my boss would be very anoyed if he found a post by me with links to a competitors website.

[bens]

I'm as unhappy as anyone about matter discussed in this thread. But I urge everyone participating to try to understand that this site cannot come free.

 

If you have been participating more than a few weeks, and have posted more than a dozen forum entries or photos, if you have been around for a year or two -- come on, pay the $25 dollars. That's a part of the solution to the problem posed in this thread.

 

Thanks Brian for turning it off. Hopefully it can stay off if people pay up.

[mottershead]

Thank you for your request, Jay. I will honor it with respect to previous posts, possibly by deleting them. However, I am not providing you with your own personal Terms of Use by giving you, and nobody else, a "do not modify" card. IF you don't accept the possibility that your posts may be modified, and that your recourse if this happens is to request that the modification be undone or that the post be deleted, then please do not post.

[mottershead]

Volker, ithe IntelliTXT code is heavy. For every photo.net page, it downloads three substantial javascript files. The code for scanning through the text of the page and determining what terms should be converted to links is quite weighty.

 

At least one of the three Javascript files is downloaded every time, probably because the list of search terms can change in real-time. The other scripts are probably cached, and I don't think they should be downloaded every time as long as your browser caches them.

 

But even though, relatively speaking, this is a big increase in the download size of most forum threads, it is still only a few kilobytes in absolute terms, and shouldn't be noticable. What might be noticable is that the code takes quite a long time to run, and in my browser anyway, the status line says it is "loading" for a fair amount of time. The page is actually loaded and readable, but the IntelliTXT code hasn't finished deciding what to make hot on the page.

[jay_blocksom]

<BLOCKQUOTE><I><B>David Gonzalez, aug 01, 2005; 06:10 p.m.</B>

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They seem to have stopped appearing.

</I></BLOCKQUOTE>

 

It looks that way from here.  *IF* this represents a permanent change of heart on Brian/PhotoNet's part, then I'm satisfied, at least for now.  But I find it *literally* incredible that the adverse reaction to this sort of thing would not have been anticipated.  Michael R. Freeman summed it up rather well when he said:

<BLOCKQUOTE><I>

You are inserting content in other posters comments/discussions without their consent or knowledge. I certainly don't want my comments to be shilling for some company that I may or may not approve of. How long before "Abe's of Maine" or the like pops up under one of these auto-generated pieces of garbage.

</I></BLOCKQUOTE>

The sheer presumptuousness and lack of forethought belied by this episode makes me wonder what the *next* fiasco will be.

 

<BLOCKQUOTE><I><B>Ben S, aug 01, 2005; 06:22 p.m.</B>

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I'm as unhappy as anyone about matter discussed in this thread. But I urge everyone participating to try to understand that this site cannot come free.

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If you have been participating more than a few weeks, and have posted more than a dozen forum entries or photos, if you have been around for a year or two -- come on, pay the $25 dollars. That's a part of the solution to the problem posed in this thread.

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Thanks Brian for turning it off. Hopefully it can stay off if people pay up.

</I></BLOCKQUOTE>

 

That sounds uncomfortably like a threat.

<br>

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While I presume (for the moment, anyway) that you, Ben, are not one of the PhotoNet administrators, and that therefore your implication does not represent an official PhotoNet policy, it is ominous nonetheless.  It also ignores the fact that cash is not by any means the only way to contribute value to PhotoNet.  I, for example, have answered *far* more questions than I've asked in the ~20 months I've participated here.  Without that participation, (and similar from thousands of knowledgable users, whether they *also* contribute in cash or not), PhotoNet would be near-worthless, and it would surely attract far fewer visitors -- which inherently means that the potential revenue from the *legitimate* forms of advertising contained on the site would be adversely impacted.

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I would hope that Brian, et al, would not be so foolish as to throw out that baby with the bathwater.

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[bens]

Jay, if you want photo.net to follow its terms of use, shouldn't you do the same? Have you read the subscribe policy? Why are you an exception to it?

 

Regardless of the policy, many of us contribute a lot of content. That does not mean we don't also need to contribute money if we'd like a site that works for us.

 

As for threats and the like, I've got no idea what you are talking about. I again urge people to pay the subscription fee to support the site, you included if you haven't done so and can.

 

As for me being a site administrator or having anything to do with running the site, it would be a great compliment if I were, but I am not. Brian is surely getting a very good laugh out of that one given the rants I have engaged in during my time here!

[jay_blocksom]

<BLOCKQUOTE><I><B>Brian Mottershead, aug 01, 2005; 06:27 p.m.</B>

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Thank you for your request, Jay. I will honor it with respect to previous posts, possibly by deleting them.

</I></BLOCKQUOTE>

 

As I noted previously, that would be the far-from-ideal solution; but it is an acceptable one if no other can be implemented.

 

<BLOCKQUOTE><I>

However, I am not providing you with your own personal Terms of Use by giving you, and nobody else, a "do not modify" card. IF you don't accept the possibility that your posts may be modified, and that your recourse if this happens is to request that the modification be undone or that the post be deleted, then please do not post.

</I></BLOCKQUOTE>

 

Sorry, but that just isn't good enough.

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The excerpt from the T&C that Lance posted, to the effect that you have the right to delete, move, or edit any postings that you consider unacceptable or inappropriate, etc., is one thing -- obviously, you need to be able to control and abate abuse, profanity, flame wars, spam, and lord-knows-how-many other potentially "bad things" that could beset any "public forum" such as this one.  And I have no objection to that, or to your having the "right" to do it, when the situation warrants it.  But that is a *FAR* cry from committing the abuse yourself -- which is exactly what these auto-generated links constitute, when they are permitted to infect postings made by the rank-and-file PhotoNet user.  You need to ponder carefully yet another of Michael R. Freeman's comments:

 

<BLOCKQUOTE>

"Incidentally, we've been running the Intellitxt links on the site in the Articles sections (Equipment, Travel, Learn) since July 13, and nobody has said a word in over two weeks."

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<br>

The Articles sections are YOUR content, forum postings are OUR content. There is a *BIG FRIGGIN* difference!

</BLOCKQUOTE>

 

*That* is the issue in a nutshell; and it frankly amazes me that you apparently do not *yet* understand it, even if you initially neglected to ponder it sufficiently.

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I got the impression that, as of a little after 6:00 PM EDT, you had turned off the robo-linking entirely, or at least within the Forums.  That was the right move; and at the very least, you need to leave it that way with respect to the Forums (as Michael pointed out, other parts of PhotoNet are at least putatively a different matter).  If you insist on co-opting contributor's articles for third-party commercial purposes, then NO ONE who is at all concerned with *their* intellectual property rights could possibly continue to participate here.  This robo-linking scheme amounts to "putting words in my mouth"; and I, for one, sure as He__ do *NOT* want any recommendation for "Abe's of Maine" or similar to even *appear* to come from my hand. 

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Face it...  You made a mistake.  Big deal -- people are human, and mistakes happen all the time.  Nothing to be all that embarrassed about, in and of itself.  But to fail to learn from that mistake, and to insist on continuing/repeating it....  That is another matter.

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