People hotlinking to your website

[FourWheelDrift]

How do people feel about this, I for one find it incredibly annoying when people link directly to items on my website especially when it's hotlinked back to their own website.

Anyway to block this, other than an email to say take it down and stop it?

[BrianTheYank]

Do what pwiggy did. Change the url of ur thingy and redirect the link they are using to some self insulting thingy.

[Gaffer]

www.htmlbasix.com/disablehotlinking.shtml

Claire

[FourWheelDrift]

BrianTheYank said:

Do what pwiggy did. Change the url of ur thingy and redirect the link they are using to some self insulting thingy.

I have done, but I can still see all the attempts in the log.

I guess I'm just asking whether a semi-rude email to someone hotlinking would be ok to send, asking them to also take down the now defunct link?

[TheHobbit]

you can do it with mod rewrite on apache servers. if the referrer is not yours, or certain allowed hotlinkers, you can either block it with a 4XX, or feed them a "stop hotlinking to me" picture instead that gets stuck on their page and makes 'em look daft....... google is your friend for tutorials and examples.

[arcturus]

You can do it by setting up an .htaccess file on the server (assuming Apache)

Tutorial here: http://wsabstract.com/howto/htaccess.shtml

[FourWheelDrift]

Thanks Claire & TheHobbit........& arcturus

Some things to look at

>> Edited by FourWheelDrift on Wednesday 5th May 14:10

[TheHobbit]

both of these are what I was thinking of:

http://bignosebird.com/apache/a13.shtml
http://bignosebird.com/apache/a16.shtml

got them from this google
www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=bandwidth+theft+mod+rewrite&btnG=Search

[rpguk]

www.cockeyed.com/pranks/imposter/imposter.html

Some great fun with hotlinkers (great site in general by the way)

>> Edited by rpguk on Wednesday 5th May 14:37

[simpo two]

Sorry to be dim but - if a hyperlink is within (say) my own website, how do they get in to change it?

I can understand someone linking TO my site, but not FROM it... duh...

[FourWheelDrift]

simpo two said:

Sorry to be dim but - if a hyperlink is within (say) my own website, how do they get in to change it? I can understand someone linking TO my site, but not FROM it... duh...

They don't change it they use the link to the item on their own site.

It's people hotlink huge items such as Video clips by having the direct link to it on their website instead of a website page link. Images and photo's are fine, they are small and non-bandwidth restrictive.

Although having thought about it other websites that use photo's and pictures on their pages by linking to them on your own website is naughty.

>> Edited by FourWheelDrift on Wednesday 5th May 15:58

>> Edited by FourWheelDrift on Wednesday 5th May 16:00

[JonRB]

This is what happened to Steve with sleepy-fish, isn't it? He was hosting large files like mpegs in his webspace and other car sites were linking to it directly, thus increasing his bandwidth use and ultimately getting his host at the time to close his account.

[JonRB]

simpo two said:

Sorry to be dim but - if a hyperlink is within (say) my own website, how do they get in to change it? I can understand someone linking TO my site, but not FROM it... duh...

They don't. But you need to remember that when you insert a picture into your website the html that is generated is a URL to the picture. However, a URL is simply a request to a web server to serve up the required resource - in this case a picture. The web server can be configured to refuse that request.
So nothing in your web site is changed - it's just that your request is now denied.

[FourWheelDrift]

JonRB said:

This is what happened to Steve with sleepy-fish, isn't it? He was hosting large files like mpegs in his webspace and other car sites were linking to it directly, thus increasing his bandwidth use and ultimately getting his host at the time to close his account.

I believe so, I have 50GB of bandwidth per month but I still want to control it.

[agent006]

JonRB said:

getting his host at the time to close his account.

Sneezing in the wrong dorection will get an account closed with that host.