Don't hotlink userinfo images

[zaluzianskya]

Title:
Don't hotlink userinfo images

Area:
external linking

Summary:
So you know that nifty trick you can do where you type <user name=example site=examplesite.com> and the username that shows up will be styled for examplesite.com, with the link going to example.examplesite.com and with examplesite.com's profile userhead coming up? Well, when you do that, the userheads are all hotlinked.

Description:
Except for Livejournal's, anyway. I tested this with all of the example journal sites I could think of, and for all of the ones that I tried, the profile images were hotlinked from that site's server, instead of being stored locally like LJ's is at http://s.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif

Check the image sources for these images and you will see:

announcements
news
news (this userhead is the same as LJ's, but being pulled from Journalfen's server)
new_shit

So... basically my suggestion is to store them all locally. (As a side benefit, this would allow users to customize how different sites' userheads show up in their styles!)

Poll #4508 Don't hotlink userinfo images

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 50

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
15 (30.0%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
4 (8.0%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
13 (26.0%)

(I have no opinion)
18 (36.0%)

(Other: please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Comments

[denise]

I know there was a reason for doing it that way (other than so we could catch it if a place changes the userhead), but I can't for the life of me remember what it was ...

[rho]

Copyright, maybe? At least with some of them?

[cesy]

What's your reason for wanting the change? You can already customise how they show up in your style - matgb has instructions. Hotlinking means that it respects any changes on the remote site, such as AO3's recent change.

[jadelennox]

Actually, that's one of the reasons I'm in favor of this suggestion. I find it really confusing when suddenly the icon changed, and it wasn't until I noticed that the favicon had also changed in my browser tab that I understood that those new usernames were pointing to the ao3.

Also, isn't hotlinking generally considered bad form? Even if it's just the favicon? I always felt that way, but maybe I'm just so five years ago in this belief.

[cesy]

Hotlinking large images or videos and thus using up the host's bandwidth is considered bad form. In this case, the number of userheads is unlikely to be a huge drain on the remote site's bandwidth, and is outweighed by the other factors mentioned, IMHO.

[matgb]

isn't hotlinking generally considered bad form?

It used to be, back when bandwidth was one of the most expensive things a site had to worry about.

These days, a tiny favicon is such a tiny image that most sites'd barely notice it was happening.

Hotlinking a large image or similar wihtout permission would still be a bad thing, but a small filesize icon, that's likely to get cached quickly, shouldn't be an issue.

[zvi]

I find it really confusing when suddenly the icon changed, and it wasn't until I noticed that the favicon had also changed in my browser tab that I understood that those new usernames were pointing to the ao3.

Uh, isn't that, essentially, a problem you had with the Archive of Our Own not announcing a change in their iconography? If deadjournal updates their favicon, what delay would be appropriate for us to reflect it, if we started caching?

[jadelennox]

i guess for me it's that I don't associate "userhead" with "favicon".For LiveJournal and dreamwidth they aren't the same thing, for example. And I see why they are for all of the other sites -- it's not like we are going to make site-specific userheads for all of the other sites out there -- but even so, my brain parses them differently. Favicons I barely register except in those rare times when I am looking at my tab bar and trying to figure out which tab I'm looking for (multiple times a day, I admit, but it's peripheral, not front and center). When AO3 changed theirs, there was a moment of WTF, but it was never in the center of my noticing. But userheadsare right there in the main body content, very much in your face.

[matgb]

See, one of the things I did in my layout was CSS it so that the LJ userhead was replaced by the favicon. Because I want to know it's someone or something on LJ when I see it on DW, and don't want Comms or Feeds to have a userhead.

And I register favicons as one of the first things I see about a site, I recall posting about a site that used the IE logo as their favicon, very offputting.

[zaluzianskya]

Ah, where are those instructions at? As far as I can tell, you can change the way they look in your style, but whatever you set for Dreamwidth's userinfo image will also apply to any hotlinked userinfo image, because they share the same filename.

So if, for example, I wanted to write a Greasemonkey script to change all Insanejournal userinfo images to something else (because I hate the way they look)... is that even possible?

[matgb]

I've done it as a CSS trick for my layout specifically, so it works on my friends page and entries, and can also apply to style=mine viewing.
[LJ/DW] Making profile icons look cool in your layout
[DW] Profile link icons update.

You could almost certainly put the code into Stylish, I've never played with Greasemonkey.

whatever you set for Dreamwidth's userinfo image will also apply to any hotlinked userinfo image, because they share the same filename.

Not really, no, the key trigger is the full URL of each image, if there are multiple different images, they must have multiple URLs. You just need to know the exact location of every file you want to replace.

And if, for example, the site you're dealing with (like, say, Livejournal) changes their URLs for all their images (by, for example, switching the CDN they're using), then you'll need to redo all the code for that specific site. To be fair, I haven't had to do that for LJ stuff for at least a year, they appear to like their current CDN.

The way I've got mine setup, any image that I haven't specifically coded something for ends up having a Dalek, I keep meaning to change it to something I'm not using to represent something, Dalek is for both feeds and anything else, which is Wrong (as official comms like this one currently get a Dalek).

[msilverstar]

It seems like this could slow down display if an external site has a non-robust server and randomly disappears, gets overloaded, loses track of images, etc.

I'd go with a local cache refreshed daily or something.

[exor674]

I was gonna say no, but I'm saying instead:

Sorta no, but if caching wouldn't add too much load on our end, cache, otherwise lets just hotlink -- hopefully they're at most 1k.

Having our own copy means potentially copyright issues ( "this is our userhead, why is it hosted on your site?!?!?!?" ), we'd have to keep up with icons changing for the site ( Yeah, changing can be bad too but then we'd have people going "uh, why is DW using <old icon> for AO3, they changed that MONTHS ago" ), etc...

[kyrielle]

+1 - pulling it into the cache and refreshing on a reasonable basis (not sure what that would be) seems like the best approach unless it presents significant problems to do. Mostly for the "doesn't die when the remote site is down" aspect.

Of course, that would create a lag (of, at a maximum, whatever length of time was a 'reasonable basis') between changes to a remote site's user icons and the update appearing on Dreamwidth.

[zvi]

Suggestion fails to explain the problem it would be solving.

[zaluzianskya]

The problem is that images are being hotlinked from other sites. I hadn't realized that the netiquette on hotlinking had changed, as has been explained in these comments; I grew up in an era where hotlinking is just bad, period.

[faithofone]

In my opinion, hotlinking is still bad, very bad.

I support the option of hosting them locally on Dw and pulling them from the remote server once a day.

This will also ensure that if a service ceases to exist, all the old links will still display correctly on Dw.