Sunday, January 31, 2016


Five more jokes are in the queue, and things are kinda going OK at the moment. I find it odd, however, that Bing’s image search is still hot-linking to where the image files used to be located… Oh, how can I explain this…

Before 2016, all the images were stored like this:
https://flushtwice.com/wp-content/uploads/year/month/image.jpg

As of January 11, 2016, the “/year/month” part of the address had been removed so that all images are stored directly under “./wp-content/uploads”. A week later, Bing, Yahoo, and something called Kik began referring people to those images in their old locations, which of course results in a 404 not found page. What’s worse is the search terms used had nothing to do with the image they were trying to view.

I know what you’re thinking… Maybe they were linking to those images all along, and you just noticed it when the 404’s started happening… Well, no… There was simply no direct linking to any of my image files until a week after the change. I check for that stuff, because in the past I would have been ecstatically flattered if someone hot-linked to one of my comics in some forum, but that never happened, and these are just search engines lumping my comics with random offensive search terms that aren’t related to the comic. The whole experience has led me to permanently disable hot-linking. Although I’m not too happy about the way in which my webhost actually handles the hot-link blocking situation, it’s the best I can do for now.

So more controls have been put in place, more IP addresses have been blocked, and that includes every IP address belonging to Microsoft to keep them from crawling my site for at least the next 90 days. Fingers crossed, I’m hoping the overall traffic to the site will start to look more legit in the coming weeks.

Pax,

-f2x

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