Yet another reason to hate livejournal
First and foremost, I hate 99.9% of free blogs (and most of their users). They create a massive community of hotlinking little bastards who steal the bandwidth of those of us who actually pay for it.
Now I have even less respect for at least one of the leading blog communities.
Livejournal has added in a new blurb to their TOS (specifically, section XVI, subsection 17, part A and B) that ban the use of popup blockers if you use their service.
Now I understand that adds are how they make money… but banning the use of software that might block those adds is a little heavy handed.
There is one bright side to this…. both Firefox and IE now have built in popup blockers in them. So, using either of the browsers to view a livejournal “blog” is against the rules. Therefore, if you use either of these browsers (and pretty much everyone uses at least one of them), don’t visit any sites on that domain. While your at it, do the same with the myspace community.
Trust me… you won’t be missing much.
If we can reduce the number of visits, we can effectively put them out of business, and therefore cut the amount of bandwidth we have to pay for to keep those hotlinking little smacktards who can’t seem to comprehend the concept of hosting their own content.
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You do realize of course that Cappy, ‘Flap and I all have LJs, right? We must be the .1%. Oh and I’ve never gotten a pop-up, nor even a floating banner ad. I think what you’re really angry about is the abundance of adolescent, angsty teenagers who treat the web like its the old rumpus room in the basement. And no one likes them anywhere they put their feet up. Livejournal or otherwise. Most of the hotlinking problem is spawned by the owners of the adhouse sites that create those stupid poll pages that give you automatically generated text and links to tuck into your journal. They tell the kids that this is how to get pics and content into your site. So that ad revenue can be generated. The kids don’t really know any better. Anyway, its stupid that LJ created an utterly unenforceable TOS that will serve no other purpose than making them look like dicks. Because no reads their TOS page, and certainly in this instance, no one will heed it anyway.
Yes… you are in the .1%, miftah.
Every single day, I’m renaming images on my sites because some smacktard livejournal or myspace user is hotlinking to them.
While I do get a ton of bandwidth from my ISP (and I don’t even come close to using it all), I would run out and end up with additional charges if I left this unchecked.
Of course, it does bring a little light into my dull and dreary life, as I get to replace those images with others of my choosing (and yes… the results can be quite funny… to me at least).