Stolen images and hacked forum

[deadhippo]

Well, the last few days have been interesting. Any tips on how to get someone to remove your images from their site...in french

The hacked forum is another issue.

[Doug M]

Yikes - sorry to hear it.

phpBB forums have always been a popular target of hackers since it's so common around the web. Fortunately they have a good development team for an open source project and have actively patched security gaps. I can only suggest trying their own support forums for answer to this one. It's been so long since I've run a phpBB forum, I'm out of touch with it today.

Stolen image are worse. Because you have so many quality original images, I imagine you've had to deal with this before. Here's what I've done in the past.

If the images are hotlinked, that's different and easier to deal with. I'm guessing that isn't what happened and they are being hosted on another server.

I would send one short and polite email first (which probably won't work). I would contact their host with a copy of the email and description of the violation containing some evidence of the images being owned by you. Look for the host's "terms and conditions" for a clause forbiding copyright violations and quote it back to them. Be a pest.

Now, I can't say that I recommend this next step but out of frustration I did this once. If the offending website has any advertising, find out who is paying for the ads be it private party or an ad network. Write to them explaining they are paying to run ads on a site in violation of copyright law and you are planning to take action and will not leave it alone. This worked very well for me once before. Again, be a pest.

You will also find this is a subject on many webmaster community websites. There will be more ideas on how to properly deal with copyright violations in forums on these sites than I can type out here.

[deadhippo]

Hey Doug
Thanks, thats great advice ad I will check out the other sites
i was a bit tired and frustrated recently and I dont really have time to deal with these small issues with the JLPT coming up and some writing assignments coming my way at the same time
but anyway they didnt do ant real damage and im pretty sure i know how they got in
the kind people at phpBB havent gotten back to me yet as far as I know but anyway I've made a decision to redo my board from scratch and im considering going for a vbulletin like yourself but i have to research it a bit regarding redesign and ease of use and stuff like that
its not really a problem while my site is still small
it might be a big issue when my site gets bigger

[Doug M]

Take my advice. If you can swing the cost, buy a vBulletin license. The support and quality are well worth it. I held out for a long time with a phpBB forum like you. When I finally made the move it was an eye opener. Qualified representatives answered my questions promptly in the support forums and the script has more bells and whistles than you ever wished for. The only downside is a learning curve. There are so many features that you'll spend days or weeks just setting up your community.

As far as stealing content (photos in your case) goes, you could make a full time job out of chasing down everyone who violates your terms. Personally, I closely monitor my access logs and go after the top few each month as required. Sometimes the violation is simply a new webmaster who doesn't understand that content isn't for the taking. Sometimes it is malicious but I find this less common.

I also don't have the time to deal with minor issues. I think any webmaster will agree that time is by far the most valuable asset and many of us hold down "real" jobs while striving to publish new content. I have several new sites I'm trying to get off the ground while keeping Japan-101 up to date. There aren't enough hours in the day.

[deadhippo]

Thanks again for taking the time to advise me and for sharing your knowledge. I have decided to take your advice and go vBulletin. Partly because I checked out the demo and I have to admit it is a bit daunting but today i was hacked again and its just a bit of a pain in the ass.

[yaschan]

Myself I've been satisfied enough with Yabb. True their support isn't exactly fantastic, sometimes they give so poor answers and some questions go unanswered - that's what you get with free forums. Yabb 2.x should be secure though.

About image hotlinking, I've had some trouble. There is a photo of actress Tamlyn Tomita. That image got so much hotlinked to another sites that it ended up eating hundreds of megas bandwidth per day. As I don't want to disable hotlinking alltogether, I banned those hotlinkers manually by using .htaccess rewrite code, based on referer.

I really recommend using .htaccess to ban referer spammers. Although referer spam isn't basically a big deal if you don't display last referers, it's still good to ban them because of wasted bandwidth. Also I realized that amount of hack attempts decreased a big deal after I made my own custom .htaccess file. Every day over 1000 hits get banned from bad bots etc.