It was brought to my attention today that a number of sites were stealing our graphics and including them in their pages, not even downloading them and just displaying them pulled directly from the ManaNation server. It is frustrating already when images are stolen from ManaNation without any attribution or backlinks, but to also cost us money by ‘hotlinking’ our images is even more of an insult. I can attribute some to user naivety but the majority of the instances I’m referring to are other site managers willfully stealing and using to their own benefit.

Today we’ve enabled hotlink protection, so that if you try to display the image from our server on yours, it will instead display either a broken image or an image explaining that this image has been hotlinked from mananation.com.

I can’t do much to stop people stealing and redistributing our images as their own, I hate watermarking and don’t want to do that but I may have to. I’ve held off doing that, but I fear the time is coming soon.

I apologize to those bloggers and forum users who now have posts with bad images, I hate punishing users who don’t know any better, but I have to protect ManaNation and try to keep costs down.

– Trick

1. no need to apologize. We all understand. protect the brand.

   Mtgxman | December 15, 2009, 11:55 am | #

2. You’re supposed to have one of those clever “punishment” images when someone tries to hotlink.

   Forget explaining why, just make someone’s website display content that they’d never want to.

   redsai | December 15, 2009, 6:10 pm | #