[info] use leechers for your own purpose - HA!

[nGFX]

so your game is leeched?

your bandwidth is drained?

the swf is illegally linked?

or the page the swf was embeded?

you've been told to use it to your advantage?

place links to your homepage, so that "missleaded" visitors could see who is behind the great game?

let me tell you something: forget it! take the game down. put it on a new url every day!
you will NOT have ANY advantage!

ROFL! nothing will happen! NO ONE will visit your homepage!
you don't believe it?

ok, here comes a story ...
as most regular visitors know i have written a game called "DynaMiner" which has been leeched. the game is plastered with links to my HP, the page with the swf was full of links to my HP.
statistics:
although i have replaced the game's page with an empty (except some images of the game and a link to my HP) the game is visited by about 5000 different IP adresses a day. i log EVERY access to that page, i can identify EVERYONE who came from the game's page and visits my HP.
from 5000 visits, at max 5 visit ngfx.de afterwards. out of about 545.000 people who have played the game, 24 people visited the creators HP (maybe to see if there are more games to play)

same goes for splitted images (by far not so popular, but the logs prove the above).

conclusion:
you can let people link to games that are some 100k, it doesn't hurt you, but it doesn't help you either.
but when it comes to games that are large (and i think that the 990k for dynaminer IS large) you'll pay more than you get out of it.

people who visit shovelware / leech sites don't care about YOU as the author, they don't care WHO you are, they don't care for the work you have put into the game, they don't care WHERE the game comes from
AS LONG AS THEY CAN PLAY THE GAME - FREE!

this is not against the players, but fact is you WON'T sell ANYTHING to visitors from leech sites.

i'm ok again, but this must be said: either you protect your work or you can make it opensource ...

so have a nice day, nGFX

PS: forget about posting tips how i could prevent leeching. i'm currently writing a pretty failsave method that prevents linking to the swf and/or the page the swf is embeded in. (i know you could still get it from the cache and decompile it ... BUT you will NOT be able to link it.