ASCII by Jason Scott

Jason Scott's Weblog

The February Goat Update —

I know people are probably wondering how that whole replace a popular image with a less popular one experiment has been going. While I doubt I’ll be doing many more “updates” unless something really cool or interesting happens in the future, I might as well give some hard statistics for the people who were wondering what the addition of Goatse did to dissuade users on Myspace from using the art.

Well, I’m happy to report that only a mere 18,000 people were goatse’d in the month of February, plus another 3,000 who saw it in conjunction with the article on here.

So wait, you’re saying, people still haven’t gotten rid of the grim reaper picture on their pages? Still?

No, in fact a good amount of them have done something worse.

Many of them now have their backgrounds set up to download the grim reaper pic, then immediately download a black background and overlay it over the picture.

As hard as I may try sometimes, you just can’t make this stuff up.

You win this round, clueless Internet Passengers!

A few of the kids have simply shifted from the Grim Reaper image over to the other cool images in that directory, so it does mean they took the time to really browse around and find something else to hotlink to. I thought that was nice.

I suspect I’ll just quietly kill hotlinking for artscene.textfiles.com, since it’s just causing too much trouble bandwidth-wise, but not quite yet. I thought it ironic that while writing the Peter Hirschberg entry I posted recently, I ended up having to make local copies of all his stuff because… his server forbids hotlinking. That’ll show me.

Anyway, onwards to real content tomorrow. I take requests, by the way.


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7 Comments

  1. AngiePen says:

    LOL! Thanks for updating that, seriously. I always get a kick out of how some people will do five times as much work to get around the barrier someone’s set up to keep them from doing something they shouldn’t do, as it would take to just do the darned thing right. Talk about a Rube Goldberg solution! 😛

    Maybe next time you could substitute a graphic that has the URL for Photobucket and instructions for using it…? [wry smile]

    Angie

  2. leahpeah says:

    i have someone using one of my photos on her blog. i asked her to remove it a few months ago, switched out the picture so it shows her own face, but she hasn’t.
    people are weird.

  3. sclozza says:

    Try explaining why hotlinking is bad to someone who doesn’t know, it’s something to behold. I have tried to explain to my friend who is a myspace junkie why what he is doing is no good, but it’s more fun to bang your head against a brick wall.

  4. Ice says:

    Since many myspace users use IE, could you use:
    http://www.heise-online.co.uk/security/Risky-MIME-sniffing-in-Internet-Explorer–/features/112589

    And create a fun image with embedded JS to do really fun stuff? Alert messages, redirects, open new windows with goatse. etc.?

  5. jas says:

    myspace does not allow .js and filters most code.

  6. Ice says:

    Please follow the link, the js would embedded in an image as demonstrated by the link.

  7. 300baud says:

    That’s hilarious; the Homer Simpson / Mr. X school of page design