I really am going soon, but one last glance at my flist and I found this post by iconifer. Good grief this makes me mad! Not the post and definitely not iconifer who should be given a medal for bringing this to everyone's attention. No, it's the fuckers who have the accounts over at Xanga and are not only 'collating' icons made by others without credit, but they're hotlinking! That's bandwidth theft, it costs money. It looks from the comments and language that a lot of the fuckers are teenagers so maybe they don't realise that. There are a few of them who have a big note saying "I didn't make these" but it doesn't stop them from hotlinking. I pay a web host for Moments Lost, that includes bandwidth that I'm expecting to use. If someone else is using the images on my site in their web pages, that takes my bandwidth that I paid for. So far I've not found any of my icons on these (for want of a better word) sites but there are hundreds on there that I recognise from icon communities I'm in.

I'm so angry on behalf of the people who spent ages working on those icons, a lot of effort and emotion goes into each one. I love making icons right now but it takes a lot out of me. It's not something I grudge at all, in fact I'd probably be upset if I wasn't making icons. Some of the finished products I like, some make me cringe, but they're all mine and I'm proud of them. It gives me a happy little buzz when I see someone using an icon I made, so long as I know about it! One of mine showed up on a Firefly community post - my Kaylee 'shiny' one - and I had no idea who the person was. I was a bit pissed off 'till I checked the keywords - they'd somehow found the Moments Lost page and because at the time I didn't have my LJ name on there, they'd pasted in the full URL and a big thank you in their keywords. I found that really sweet!

Okay, so I went off on a tangent because I'm so pissed off my brain's whirling in tangents.

So a message to any of the fuckers at xanga - do not steal bandwidth. If any of my icons end up on your sites I swear I will hunt you down.

Edited to add I've just loaded an anti-hotlinking code on Moments Lost. I cleared my cache to make sure my mood theme (which is stored there) and the images down the side are okay and they seem to be. If anything's screwy can someone let me know?