link without username?

photobphotob Registered Users Posts: 2 Beginner grinner
edited September 1, 2004 in SmugMug Support
Can a link to a single photo by made without the viewer being able to figure out the username? I know you can just replace the username.smugmug.com/link with www.smugmug.com/link and the photo will come up...but if you remove the www, it resolves back to the username.

I want to post a link on ebay or a forum without having everyone viewing all my galleries, or seeing my username.

thanks

Comments

  • onethumbonethumb Administrators Posts: 1,269 Major grins
    edited August 27, 2004
    photob wrote:
    Can a link to a single photo by made without the viewer being able to figure out the username? I know you can just replace the username.smugmug.com/link with www.smugmug.com/link and the photo will come up...but if you remove the www, it resolves back to the username.

    I want to post a link on ebay or a forum without having everyone viewing all my galleries, or seeing my username.

    thanks

    I'm afraid you've already found the only way to do that: use www.smugmug.com instead of yournick.smugmug.com.

    I'll look into whether I can make smugmug.com behave the same way, so they can't just delete "www" and have it resolve.

    The main reason it works this way, by the way, is because otherwise you could make it look as if your photos actually belonged to someone else. So the site prevents that sort of "URL hijacking" by redirecting you to the right site if it's wrong.

    No promises, but I'll see what I can do.

    Don
  • photobphotob Registered Users Posts: 2 Beginner grinner
    edited August 31, 2004
    that would be great. I think if someone wanted to claim the photos as their own, they would just download it and resave it on another server or whatever.


    Thanks for your response!
  • onethumbonethumb Administrators Posts: 1,269 Major grins
    edited September 1, 2004
    photob wrote:
    that would be great. I think if someone wanted to claim the photos as their own, they would just download it and resave it on another server or whatever.


    Thanks for your response!

    As an example, we have people running for political office using smugmug. Howard Dean ran his presidential campaign using us, and Obama For Illinois is doing it now. Others do as well.

    If we didn't have this protection, it would be remarkably easy for some other smugmug subscriber to upload a photo (say, some porn or something), and then post URLs that looked exactly like they were coming from Dean or Obama's campaigns.

    That's why the feature exists - it's to protect people from "pretending" like they're you. Incidentally, this is the biggest problem with email right now - spam itself is bad, but it's much much worse when it looks exactly like it's coming from eBay or Microsoft or something and really isn't.

    That's why I can't promise we can "fix" this issue -- the cure might be worse than the disease.

    Don
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