Playing Nicely

Here at Robbie Williams Obsessed we don't believe in rules and regulations. We appreciate that everybody will have different opinions - how boring would it be if we all subscribed to the same mantras - and indeed we positively encourage healthy debate where it is of a constructive nature.

We trust that our members are responsible enough to make their own judgements when it comes to what they post on the message boards, and in all of the dealings they have with fellow members, and all members are solely responsible for what they post. Therefore, all we ask of you is that you use your common sense and courtesy - if you wouldn't like it, don't do it to somebody else.

We hope to be so busy constantly updating the site that we don't have time to be monitoring what's going on, but if we do happen to see something which is blatantly offensive, we will have a quiet word. And in the same vein, if you are unhappy or concerned about anything and you don't feel that you can sort it out without help, then let one of us know. Our most fervent wish is that RWO stays the happy and friendly place it has always been - we've seen at first hand how misunderstandings can quickly escalate into full-scale slanging matches - life is too short!

So this is the approach we want to take. However, we're fully aware that it's not generally deemed 'sensible' to start a forum with no rules, so we will be keeping an eye on things to see how it goes. If it becomes obvious that our implicit trust in our fellow members has been misplaced, we will review the situation. In the meantime we would just advocate common sense, courtesy, respect, deep breathing and counting to ten if necessary! But most of all - have fun, and enjoy!

Although we have galleries full of gorgeous pics of our man, we understand that sometimes there will be a photo so gorgeous that people just have to have it for themselves, and not only that, they will often find one elsewhere that they want to share with their favourite Robbie site (that's us, obviously!). There are two ways of going about this, the good way, which is to right-click on the picture and select 'Save as', and the bad way, which is called hotlinking. Having had a nasty experience of the latter, we want to avoid this at all costs, so to prevent accidents, here is RWO'S very basic guide to hotlinking, why it is never the right thing to do, and how to avoid it. In our case, the bandwidth issues only involve the forums; the main site is unaffected unless either Julie or Chrissie do something VERY BAD....anyway, on to the guide!

So What Is This Bandwidth Thing?

Every month, we are given a certain amount of bandwidth, which is the term for the data transferred from RWO to your computer. Whenever you are browsing the forums, you are using bandwidth - but that's ok, don't panic! We have made sure that there is more than enough to go round, and we regularly review it with our techy people to make sure that we're not using more than we should be. If you ever go to the forum and find instead a big scary message saying Bandwith Exceeded, then that means that we're getting extra popular and lots more people than we expected are looking at the site - so it's actually a good thing! - but we understand how frustrating it is if you can't get on to the forums STRAIGHT AWAY, which is why we keep an eye on it from month to month.

OK - But What's That Got To Do With Hotlinking?

On our forums, because of the way we have to post images, we don't actually host the pictures that are posted. Although they appear on our site, they have to be put through an image hosting site such as Photobucket, ImageShack or any of the many other image hosting sites out there on the web. However, some sites and blogs do host their own images, and in these cases, each of those images uses up some of that site's bandwidth. This is the case for the main site here, every image throughout the site, including those in the Gallery, uses up a certain amount of bandwidth.

One of the easiest ways to pick up a picture that you like the look of and put it in another place where you would like it to be seen is to copy and paste it. Or a more complicated way would be to take the link of the picture on the originating website, and just use that if your destination asks you for the link. But STOP RIGHT THERE!! because in doing that, you're not only taking away the picture, but also the piece of bandwidth that belongs to that picture - and that is called hotlinking. Although the picture is on your site now, the picture and the bandwidth attached to it still belongs to the original site.  Every time anybody looks at that picture on your site, bandwidth is being drained from the original site.

Now, you might think that it's just one picture, and that nobody will mind, but imagine it this way - if lots of people are doing the same thing as you, or if lots of people are looking at the picture that you have stolen, even though it's on your site now, the original website's bandwidth will be very quickly draining away. Eventually it will run out of bandwidth, meaning that the site will crash, which is not just inconvenient but often costly because the people who run the site will probably have to pay to buy more bandwidth to get it going again...can you see why generally speaking, most people think that hotlinking is not a very clever thing to do at all? And more than that - the webmasters will be able to trace who has been pinching their bandwidth... and they would have every right to be angry!

But I'm Not A Thief! - What's The Right Way To Pass Pictures On, Then?

First of all you need to save the picture to your computer's hard drive. You'll still need to right click on it, but instead of clicking "Copy", you need to click "Save" or "Save Picture As", depending on your computer. Make sure to remember where you save it to though! Then you need to open an account at one of those image hosting sites we spoke about - somewhere like PhotoBucket, or Image Shack; just put "Image Hosting Sites" into your search engine of choice, and you will be given loads of choices, and most of them look after your pictures for free. When you're all set, upload your gorgeous photo from your computer's hard drive in to your personal account on the image hosting site you have chosen, and the photo will be yours, complete with links unique to your account, to do with as you wish! (copyright laws permitting, of course - but that's a whole different story...)

So that is a very basic guide to bandwidth and hotlinking. It's not big, it's not clever, and you will be found out if you do it. But hopefully you will now understand that there is never an excuse for hotlinking, and it is never the right thing to do.

(c) RWO July 2008