Moderators (requests and notices)

I sometimes see posts with absolutely nothing in the reply, not even a . Here's an example of one from the picture association thread which I would have thought contained a picture - http://www.lfgss.com/post2652001-1403.html

^^That seems to work but how - in english idealy...

The image in that post is here:
http://www.impawards.com/1985/posters/cocoon.jpg

Basically, that site is trying to stop people "stealing" their bandwidth. A ludicrous idea in any case... but the way they've gone about it is to say: If someone requests this image and they're on impawards.com, serve the image... otherwise don't serve the image.

Now this is all based on the idea that from one web page to another, the browser sends the request like this: I just came from this page, and was told to come here.

That is, the web browser sends information about where you are, or have just been... this is called referrer information.

A useful example of referrer information: If you're on Google and you have done a search and you clicked through to a site (such as lfgss.com) then it's possible for the site to see that you'd been on Google, and because I'd see the URL I'd also see the search terms that you'd used... perhaps you'd Googled for "dolan track bike", and perhaps seeing that, I highlighted those terms on my page, or suggested a search for you (pre-populating it with those terms).

That's useful.

A bad use of referrer information might be an advertising company on a web page that sees that you were looking for dolan track bikes, and because they have Trek paying them, they plaster your whole page with adverts for Trek. Good for them, they know you're looking for bikes, but bad for you, as you have less privacy and they'll make your browser remember this shit for future.

Now... how is that image broken?

Well, when you use http:// on lfgss.com referrer information gets sent... so they know it comes from lfgss.com and not impawards.com and so they say, "Nah-uh, I'm not serving that image.". And we get broken images.

But what if you use https:// on lfgss.com? Different thing... the 's' in https is for 'secure'. And yes that means encrypted, but it also does other things, like telling your browser not to store things locally, and far more importantly in this case it tells your browser to not tell other sites where you've come from.

So... when you use https:// you get to see images on remote sites that people try and protect with referrer checking. And when you use http:// you don't see them, as remote sites will know that you've come from here and they're blocking all remote sites.

That's about as plain English as I can get on the matter.