Getting Up to Speed on r/gaming [ VIDEO ]
Ah, Reddit, we definitely have a love hate relationship. I’ve had a bunch of content make it to the front page of r/gaming over the years. And while I truly have enjoyed the additional traffic and visibility you’ve given Dueling Analogs over the years, it hasn’t come without a little strife mixed in.
When Reddit links to the url of the post, we’re awesome. The site enjoys a traffic spike as well as the benefits of additional ad revenue. But when they just post links to files hosted on Dueling Analogs‘ image caching server, we’re not so cool.
For example, the most recent exclusive comic made it to the front page r/gaming last week. Instead of linking to the post on Dueling Analogs itself, the redditor hotlinked the image file for the comic instead. There in lies the problem. When people do that Dueling Analogs enjoys virtually no traffic benefits or additional ad revenue, but does incur new costs from the additional bandwidth on the image caching server.
Now how to turn hotlinking off is not foreign to me, but I’d rather not. I think it’s an innocent mistake. I believe the people who do it just don’t realize the full ramifications of doing it that way. Besides that, any anti-hotlinking measures I could take would seriously impact the user experience for people using the RSS feed and I definitely wouldn’t want to do that.
So yeah…
