Hey, I'm a member of marvel_icons and I wanted to post the following post about opting out of LJ's rss feed for images so communities like iconscraper can't steal icons and bandwidth with no credit or notification:
No icons in this post, but as most of you have credit and no-hotlinking requests when you post your icons, I figured you'd want to know.
If you've heard of the community iconscraper, you've probably already seen this, but let me give a short explanation if you haven't.
Basically, the maintainer of iconscraper wrote a program that uses lj's live rss feed to go out and snag images that fit the parameters of an icon (100 x 100 and under 40k). Then the application steals massive quantites of icons which he posts in his community. He's saying that he "credits" because there is sort of a link back to the community or journal that he yoinked it from. Beyond the issue of credit, it hotlinks the icons from photobucket or wherever you have them hosted.
If you're cool with that, you don't have to do anything, but if you want to protect images you post on your public LJ entries from going into LJ's rss feed, this is what you do:
What this does is change the journal's user settings so that icons will not be put into the rss feed, which means the program that iconscraper has written will not be able to pick them up. They will still be displayed everywhere else, as normal. Nothing else changes.
This will only protect the images posted in your own journal, community maintainers have to set it up in their communities by going to the admin console and typing in:
set for COMMUNITY NAME latest_optout yes
and hitting enter.
But I wanted to check with you first since I wasn't putting any icons in the post, and I wanted to ask you if you had heard of it and would/had done the optout on the community before I posted publicly about it.
I just know from reading some of the posts, that most iconmakers who ask them to take it down are laughed at by their members and treated pretty rudely, so I'd rather keep everyone else from having to deal with that.
No icons in this post, but as most of you have credit and no-hotlinking requests when you post your icons, I figured you'd want to know.
If you've heard of the community iconscraper, you've probably already seen this, but let me give a short explanation if you haven't.
Basically, the maintainer of iconscraper wrote a program that uses lj's live rss feed to go out and snag images that fit the parameters of an icon (100 x 100 and under 40k). Then the application steals massive quantites of icons which he posts in his community. He's saying that he "credits" because there is sort of a link back to the community or journal that he yoinked it from. Beyond the issue of credit, it hotlinks the icons from photobucket or wherever you have them hosted.
If you're cool with that, you don't have to do anything, but if you want to protect images you post on your public LJ entries from going into LJ's rss feed, this is what you do:
Go to the admin console
For your personal journal type in:
set latest_optout yes
Then just hit enter at the bottom.
What this does is change the journal's user settings so that icons will not be put into the rss feed, which means the program that iconscraper has written will not be able to pick them up. They will still be displayed everywhere else, as normal. Nothing else changes.
This will only protect the images posted in your own journal, community maintainers have to set it up in their communities by going to the admin console and typing in:
set for COMMUNITY NAME latest_optout yes
and hitting enter.
But I wanted to check with you first since I wasn't putting any icons in the post, and I wanted to ask you if you had heard of it and would/had done the optout on the community before I posted publicly about it.
Thanks,
Maria
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I'll get the community all set up right away.
Please go ahead and post that in the community, people have a right to know. Thanks for your help and concern :)
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I just know from reading some of the posts, that most iconmakers who ask them to take it down are laughed at by their members and treated pretty rudely, so I'd rather keep everyone else from having to deal with that.
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