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

[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.