"Or are you going to start killing people who submit bad galleries next?"
This would definitely get rid of the cheaters! ;)
TheHun,
GFY is still moving like molasses like me, so I suspect the img srcing is still going on? If so - it might be time to stop; evidently it's not hurting this guy whatsoever.
Have you tried going upstream on this guy? Contacting his host; if they don't answer, contact *their* upstream provider, if they don't answer, contact *their* upstream provider.
Such as if he's got his own server and he doesn't answer, then contact the company who hosts his server (let's say it's Rackshack). If they don't answer, then contact the bandwidth provider that he's on (Verio)... and so forth. Phone calls work better than emails.
I, for one, would NOT mind putting in full contact info to submit to you. Perhaps this is something to consider. Evidently you've given paid listings some thought and decided against it - and I agree but for different reasons; if you have the same 50 webmasters submitting all the time then eventually they're going to run out of ideas for fresh-looking galleries and to your surfers they'll all look the same. But there's more than one way to skin a cat.
Such as requiring full contact info, or requiring that the submitter's email match the WHOIS info for the domain, or that the WHOIS info for the domain the gallery is on simply must be valid (no 123-456-7890 stuff for the phone number, etc).
Or you could set up a few different servers on different IPs, sub-classes, and domains to do the cheat-detection. This wouldn't be too costly to do. *One* of them would catch the thing and ban it.
Another idea is to have a little button next to each listing where a surfer can immediately report a redirecting link. Any link reported this way would *immediately* go into a temporary "holding" file/database until it could be checked, and the link would drop off of your gallery listing immediately. You've got a lot of surfers who'd be more than willing to click on a simple link for you, thereby saving you a LOT of work! You could script a program to run through the temporary database and check them; some it could obviously ban instantly but others would need to be checked by hand.
Or just do a "surfers rule" type of democracy - if a surfer reports you as cheating, your gallery is gone. Period. No questions asked. Do not pass Go, do not collect 20,000 hits.
There are many different ways to go about reaching your goal. When you img src someone you *could* be affecting other sites on that person's server who have nothing to do with the fight between you and the gallery maker. Or on that person's router. When you're with a host it's not your fault if you get connected via router to a cheater - but you can indirectly pay the consequences for it when someone with huge traffic comes along and does an img src. This is totally separate from the "cheater redirecting somewhere else issue", and needs to be taken into consideration.
Btw, thanks for the time you've spent here explaining all of this -
