Okay lemme clear something up real quick, as someone who has also made an oft-used Flight Rising tool that has never had any issues like this and never will.
I’ve seen OP mention a few times that they thought it would be okay because they were manually copying and pasting the image link, and people agreeing, which tells me that folks don’t really understand what the issue is.
The issue is an external site is accessing and manipulating Flight Rising’s data in some way, while not being on the Flight Rising domain. It might be scraping a page for data like gene colors or just hotlinking to an image. Either way, each request made puts a little bit of strain on FR’s site, in a way that FR’s staff cannot control.
It might seem like just one or two images to you, but multiplied over thousands of users can get to be a lot of off-site traffic using their resources and their bandwidth. Those things cost money, and the more are used for off-site tools, the less there is available for people actually using the site.
Obviously, people can always hotlink images, and there are ways of stopping that, too. But just because someone can do something against the rules doesn’t mean everyone needs to be allowed to. That’s not how it works.
Here’s the kicker: most of these sites would be perfectly fine if they just had users save the images to their personal hard disk and then upload them -- but again, those things cost money, and why pay when you can leach off someone else’s?
As a general rule of thumb, any site that asks you to input a dragon/item/etc ID in order to pull it up, or asks you paste a URL to a page on Flight Rising is probably going to fall foul of the TOS. I hope this helps some people understand a little better what to look out for when they’re trying out new FR tools.
(One caveat: Predict Morphology URLs can be parsed without scraping site data, the ones that have the big long string at the end. This can be used to fill out text in a tool, but would be against TOS if used to generate dragon images from the site. When in doubt: ask how the creator is getting the data.)
((Also I’m not going to comment on the veracity of the OP’s statement that they were given no warning. I just wanted to help some folks understand what the issue with these sites actually is, and that there are ways to bring them into compliance that the creators are choosing to not take.))
stormborns
izzy806
romaincrisis
origamiaround
turnnoffyourmind
snowghoul
dededos
