Are all the images on the site broken for you? If so, please read on for an explanation and details on how to fix it.
Fantasy Age is a site that uses a large collection of fantasy imagery. We have gone to painstaking details to preserve the copyrights of these images, by getting express permission when possible to use them on our site.
This being said, we still found that a lot of people were 'stealing' these images off our site and using them on their own, for all sorts of purposes, and without asking permission from the artists. They were even linking to the direct urls from our website to display the images. This wasn't just theft, this was also misuse of our web site.
To stop this, we setup an image protection scheme on Fantasy Age. What happens is, your browser connects to our servers to view the page, and our server sends a small query to your browser in response before sending any images. Our server wants to know if the images your browser is asking for are going to be displayed on Fantasy Age pages. It is asking for your referer information. Without access to this information, our server thinks you are requesting unauthorized usage of the images and simply will not display them.
There are programs out there on the internet with the specific purpose of stopping the display of ads, popup windows, allowing you to delete browser cookies and such, and they also allow you to block transmission of referral information to web sites. Truthfully, this is a useless feature as your referral information simply tells the web site you're visiting what page you're loading at the moment and possibly what page you came there from. That's actually helpful because *if*, and I repeat, *if* the webmaster has the ability to access referer information, they know which pages on their site people like, and what other sites may be linking to their site.
Let me stress that the referer information is completely anonymous! Your browser is not telling our servers who you are, just what pages you are looking at.
Some of the programs that I know of which block referers are listed below:
I do not know of others. If you have a program you suspect is blocking referers, please email me about it.
So, in conclusion, all of these programs allow you to turn off this feature on all or select web sites. If you can, please disable the block referer feature on your program for FantasyAge.com, and then reload our pages. You'll be able to see all of the images then!
Thanks!