what's all the hype?

I change my gallery URL every once in a while. The picture hits go down right afterwards. You might want to use another method however. :)

I guess I'm dim on this front as well. I rarely check my "Popular Items." It bemuses me that my most visited page is a sketch of poor Rengokuki, the minor Inuyasha villain who buys it right after the eyecatch of the only episode in which he appears. But it also concerns me that virtually all of the other 50 items are CCS cels, although this has not been the focus of my collecting for five years.

Yes, I love my CCS cels, but I'd also love to see some of my other pretties generate comparable hit numbers. Which is what my "Quirky Tour" is all about.

As I don't own the exclusive reproduction rights to the cels and sketches I possess, I guess I don't see why someone copying or linking to one of my galleries would be committing "theft."

Rubberslug artwork shows up on image sites too like Google Images. If someone is looking for an image from X anime of character Y then if you search using those parameters your artwork can easily show up near the top of the search.

"hotlinkers? argh. i loathe hotlinkers. how do i get rid of them? "

Ummm, I think you misread zerospace's (betsuni's) post. She's saying that you *don't* have hotlinkers. If someone hotlinks your image, then it wouldn't up your page views. So, there's no way to know that you have hotlinkers. (Btw, this is news to me, but I know that zerospace knows a *lot* more about this stuff than I do).

Basically, it sounds like what's happening is that someone, somewhere, is on a forum saying, "Oh, cool!!! Look at this production artwork from Peach Girl!!! I didn't know you could own this stuff!!!

http://gag.rubberslug.com/gallery/inv_info.asp?ItemID=291148"

They may even be posting links of multiple items in your gallery.


Frankly, this is what you *want* them to do. Visit your gallery. They're not stealing images, which would be downloading the image from RS, hosting it elsewhere (photobucket, imageshack, etc.) and not giving you any credit for ownership or scanning, and usually not even explaining what it is. They're also not hotlinking, which would be taking your image url (in the case above, http://www.rubberslug.com/user/d9af2018dca74ffa88b97c8a85272a14/771925-1796778-Momo.jpg) and putting into forum or site code to make it show up on their site. (Using [img*] on forums, and img src with html).


What you might possibly do is google one of the item's urls, and see if it shows up on a forum or something. If you don't want people looking at your artwork . . . you should probably close your gallery. ^^;;; Or hide or password protect everything.

EDIT: okay, the html code is disappearing when I use the appropriate brackets, even though there's an asterisk there, so I took the brackets out.

Thanks, klet -- that is exactly what I meant! You described hotlinking perfectly.

Your top items on RS aren't based on how many times someone directly pulls an image from your gallery (meaning: hotlinking of your artwork images), trust me. How do I know that? Besides the fact that I'm also a web programmer -- just, think about it. How do you think your RS site knows how many times it has been hit? It isn't magic -- something has to record the fact that someone viewed your page. The information must be stored somewhere, and if you just pull an image file alone (hotlinking), where is that info going to be stored? The answer is nowhere, because the only thing you pulled up is the image file. There's no code in an image file that tells RS how many times it has been viewed--it's just an image file sitting on RS's server, and it only displays the image. The only way RS knows that someone has looked at your artwork is if they hit the page that actually displays all the information and the image -- in all likelihood there is code embedded in the page that tells RS to log how many views your item has received thus far, thereby creating the list that you see when you look at your popular items.

The following is my personal opinion & advice to those who, for whatever reason, do not want anyone looking at their stuff or are so concerned about image theft that they would actually complain about increased item views in their gallery:

1) Watermark your images in such a way as to deter the direct viewing of your items. (To me, this begs the question -- why do you put your gallery online for public viewing, then?)
OR
2) Don't put your gallery online.

Correctly linking (not hotlinking) to another web site without asking for permission is not poor internet etiquette -- it is a perfectly acceptable thing to do. If you are going to put anything on the internet, you must accept this, or keep your stuff offline.