Bull Balls

Okay, another Crawl Cockup Call. I imagine a lot of you subscribe to the RSS feed to this thing. Has said RSS feed, over the past day or so, been feeding you pictures of bull testicles with the slogan “I am a dirty bandwidth thief” in place of real graphics?

I apologize if so. Some doof on LJ keeps hotlinking to images on my site. Other folks have got the message when I’ve simply renamed the hotlinked image and given them goatse guy in its place, but this idiot just keeps rejigging his own link to the original graphic so I’ve escalated to a .htaccess filter. I didn’t think that RSS feeds would get caught in this net — my own feed to the crawl works just fine — but a new reader has just informed me that ol’ bull balls constituted his formal introduction to the neighborhood. And while I can’t say it’s a completely inaccurate representation of the local content, it certainly isn’t intentional.

So. Show of hands?



This entry was posted on Saturday, January 5th, 2008 at 10:27 pm and is filed under misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
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Bjorn
Guest
Bjorn
16 years ago

Yup, definitely got the balls. I spent far too much time trying to figure out what the ironic intent was. 🙂

Skorgu
Guest
Skorgu
16 years ago

Google reader shows the testicles, but I’ve only just noticed today.

peter
Guest
peter
16 years ago

Newsgator hit me with two big balls.

Erik
Guest
Erik
16 years ago

Balls it is.
Via GoogleReader.

Peter Watts
Guest
16 years ago

Okay, I’m new at this, but if I understand it correctly I’ve rejigged things so that most domains are unblocked. Only those attempting to link directly from livejournal.com should get the balls. The rest of you should be back to normal.

So, is it working?

El
Guest
El
16 years ago

No bull balls. (RSSBandit.)

El

Ben H
Guest
Ben H
16 years ago

Google Reader has never shown me the balls. Even looking at “All items”, it doesn’t show me them. I feel left out – please post the balls.

gioppe
Guest
gioppe
16 years ago

Google Reader: no balls. I feel a bit left out.

Anonymous
Guest
Anonymous
16 years ago

google reader. woman fondling giant balls earlier. seems fixed now

Adam Lipkin
Guest
Adam Lipkin
16 years ago

Last night, Google Reader showed the balls. Today, the same post is balls-free.

Jena
Guest
Jena
16 years ago

No balls here, in Google Reader. I don’t suppose LJ is any help in tracking down the jerk?

Brian Dunbar
Guest
Brian Dunbar
16 years ago

So. Show of hands?

It did last night. I looked at it again at 9:04 CST and they were correct.

I have no idea how my RSS feeder does graphics – it is NetNewsWire – save that when I’m offline the grapics are unavailable which suggests they are not sucked into my feed.

buhrger
Guest
buhrger
16 years ago

ballsed last night. no balls this morning.

Raja
Guest
Raja
16 years ago

No bull balls (Google Reader).

Anonymous
Guest
Anonymous
16 years ago

I got balls via livejournal.

Your blog is syndicated via RSS feed on Livejournal: http://syndicated.livejournal.com/watts_crawl/profile

Wondering if that’s what’s causing the bandwidth issue.

Peter Watts
Guest
16 years ago

Okay. I think it’s working now. Even livejournal feeds get the right images, unless they come from certain dirty domains. (if I’m wrong on that, LJ-feed users, please let me know). Thanks to you all for helping me figure this out.

For those of you who feel left out because you couldn’t see the testicles, you will find the image here (or you will until they stop trying to hotlink to my site, anyway). Just scroll down until you come to the, well, balls. You can’t miss ’em.

For the record, I cadged the image from some other guy who’s link I can’t find, whose helpful little tutorial got me on the right path. The image itself is public domain and free to all — as long as you don’t hotlink to it, of course.