If anyone (anyone? anyone? anyone? Bueller ?) reads this site via RSS, you’ll notice that as of today it only publishes summaries. It’s not something I wanted to do, particularly, but my hand has been forced by the horrendous increase in bandwidth useage of late.

You’ll notice from the graph below that the bandwidth is the biggest hit (in green) not unique visits, hits or pages (the other three).

From an average of 3-4 gig in January to July, it doubled in the month of August and then doubled again in September. As a result the site has been offline more than once due to exceeding bandwdith. My fantastic webhost graciously increased my bandwidth in order to get the site live again, but really… this has to stop.

So far I’ve nailed a 2.5 gig increase in useage down to Bloglines, hence the disabling of full content in RSS feeds from now on. This will not be changed back. The second problem is largely down to image leeching, both from MySpace and LiveJournal. Unfortunately, I seem to be having issues getting the .htaccess file to block hotlinking, and this could be down to the wordpress installation not bring in the root of the site. Despite enabling hotlink protection from both the control panel of the site itself, and doing it manually with the .htaccess file it seems people are still able to access the images and repost them elsewhere, hitting the site’s bandwidth in the meantime.

As far as MySpace is concerned, I’ll keep trying to ip deny it as well, but I haven’t had much success with that so far. My solution thus far with MySpace leechers has been to track down the relevant pages, find out which image they’re linking to and switch it out for something else. Usually the image on the right, but if it gets much worse they’ll start getting pr0n.

The other problem is LiveJournal. Or more specifically the Latest LiveJournal Images app/script/widget/whatever you want to call it. Pretty much since my bandwidth issues started getting bad, I’ve noticed a large increase in the amount of LiveJournal referrers appearing in the webstats. I can’t be bothered to get into an online bitchfest over this, despite the author’s insistance that webmasters are a “bunch of cockguzzling quimgaggers.” Ultimately the person[s] who wrote this script aren’t responsible for the fact that ignorant gits on LiveJournal either don’t know or (more likely) don’t care that the images they hotlink to are hitting someone else’s bandwidth. It’s rather like accusing VCR manufacturers of being responsible for taped-from-the-tv copyright theft. Circular argument, and pointless. But it is causing problems for me, and this site. This isn’t a commercial site, I make no money from it. If that makes me a “cockguzzling quimgagger” then sobeit.

So, ultimately I need to find a way to sort this out. I have some time off in November, and I’m going to kill the entire site for a week or more and completely restructure the directory. This does mean that anyone who has linked to the blog in the past will have invalid links, the home page will stay the same, but the content will almost definitely be different. I’ve also found a raft of empty html pages in the cache directory, all with prescription drug spam-style names. So I have definitely been hacked in some way.

Hopefully it’ll help.