I was just thinking about those 'fair use' search engines that auto archive other people's stuff and essentially run off with it. A judge today decided this form of theft was not illegal. While we all wait for that to hopefully get appealed we'll need to work up ways around it. One could use javascript rather than html to display the images. Without html-image tags to recognize the auto archivers will not see the image. Flash is another idea. A 1 frame flash animation that contains a gif or jpg... Of course you need Flash to make those. For the javascript something like this might do it: in the head section: -script tag- function confuse_image(name,type) { var pic="img"; var gr="<"; var ls=">"; var typeim = new Array(2); typeim[0] = ".jpg"; typeim[1] = ".gif"; document.writeln(gr+pic+" src='"+name+typeim[type]+"'"+ls); } -- script end tag -- and then inside your page at the point you want an image: -- script tag -- confuse_image("mypic",0); -- script end tag -- The above is not tested, just off the top of my mind. The point is to make it as confused and garbled as possible so the search engines pass it by. maybe even put it inside an IFRAME tag. That way the search engines will consider it a frame and mostly skip it by. IFRAMEs will render properly in IE but NS will just ignore the tag. Or the other way around. I've never used them as I've never intentionall tried to write bad code. :) This all would only stop an auto archiver. And that provided that the archiver works by looking for the image tags in a page and recording them, rather than reading it's cache. Based on the interface I saw when I last went to one of those search engines I would guess that to be the case. It of course has no effect on human thieves. If you can get your ISP to cooperate with you they may even be able to block the domains of some of these search engines. I'm sure there are other ideas as well.

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A simple Meta Tag in your header on any page you do not want the search engine to index or follow any links on that page: meta name="ROBOTS" content="noindex, nofollow" Use it the same as you would KEYWORDS and DESCRIPTION The search engine robots stop at this line (most) Bill BBay.com

Add a > at the end and a < at the beginning. I couldn't show the normal way because this forum interprets any thing in brackets as an HTML tag :)

A slightly more complex, but effective way to keep the spiders out of your images: (This is a quote from Altavista, but works for almost everyone of them.) "Excluding Pages with robots.txt Our crawler will find any URL connected to the main body of the Web through even one link. If you don't want your entire site to be indexed, we strongly advise that you take advantage of the Robots Exclusion Standard by setting up a robots.txt file. It only takes a minute, and gives you complete control over what fraction of your site is indexed. The file looks like: To exclude your site from all web crawlers use: User-agent: * # directed to all robots Disallow: /cgi-bin/sources To exclude your site AltaVista's web page index: User-agent: scooter # AltaVista web page search Disallow: /cafeteria/lunch_menus/ To exclude your site AltaVista's image, video and audio clip index: User-agent: vscooter # AltaVista Image Search Disallow: /personal/images/ Any URL matching one of these patterns will be ignored by robots visiting your site."

From Altavista again... getting back to the meta tags which are the easiest: "AltaVista's crawler currently recognizes four (4) META tag exclusion options: NOINDEX prevents anything on the page from being indexed. NOFOLLOW prevents the crawler from following the links on the page and indexing the linked pages. NOIMAGEINDEX prevents the images on the page from being indexed but the text on the page can still be indexed. NOIMAGECLICK prevents the use of links directly to the images, instead there will only be a link to the page. Currently, AltaVista will only link to the page." ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ More information is at: http://www.altavista.com/cgi-bin/query?pg=addurl Happy Holidays Bill BBay.com

Now that's a handy bit of info!