I hadn't looked at my server statistics for a while, so I was surprised to discover yesterday that about 80% of my bandwidth over the past month has gone toward the serving of the pope image. The image was being hotlinked - pulled from my server rather than copied - from hundreds of sites, including the popular fark.com and dozens of livejournal weblogs. This explains why this image is the first result for "pope" on Google's image search. Lucky for me, I have enough bandwidth on my account that the extra 4Gb or so didn't do any real damage this time. But I thought it better not to wait until the next time some image on my website becomes wildly popular, however unlikely that may be. So I started blocking hotlinking, and redirecting to an image that says:
Sorry, direct linking of images on randomchaos.com is turned off to conserve bandwidth; however, please feel free to make yourself a copy of this image and host it yourself. I recommend Flickr.com for free image hosting. Thanks, scott@randomchaos.com.
I hate to break context on a bunch of sites that will now be referencing this bit of text as if it were the pope, but I'm not willing to have my site broken or made more expensive for the cause of silly pope pictures. It's a great cause, but I have a few other things I'd like to do with my website.