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imageshack and emuu.net

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

ImageShack looks like a bad idea. So I've disabled the use of their toolbar on my website.

Recently, I've noticed a lot of strange patterns in "visitor traffic". Someone using the "ImageShack" toolbar in their browser will visit a photo page, then visit a random other page only second later. Frequently, it's the site's home page, the comment-submission form, or something like that. Then five seconds later, it all starts again.

I don't know what's going on, but it seems to me that someone's using the tool to scrape my site. And given that ImageShack's toolbar allows you to save any image on the 'net to ImageShack's site with one click, I'm guessing that someone's been amassing their own version of my photo gallery on ImageShack.

So as of this morning, I've disabled browsers that use that toolbar. If you're a user of ImageShack's toolbar, you can no longer see my site, but will see this warning page.