Q to LL owners about hot linking
 

I found a site that is hotlinking two of my recip images and put in their recip table. I was wondering how link lists felt about this practice? The site is: http://www.adevil.com/myweb4/f4/f4n/index.htm

Some of the other link lists listed on that site are Cleo's, Had a Few, Sex Manhattan, Schnaggles, and others.

Would you drop this site for hot linking someone elses images? They hot linked my Site 4 Sore Eyes gif and my Sex Manhattan jpg....

I think you need an .htaccess to prevent it - people should know better than to hotlink

I contacted my server and they put something in .htaccess that should have blocked the hot linker. It didn't work so I got a bit of code from Torone at Tom's Newbie Booster Message Board and my server tech put that in. It's not working. I'm not sure what's left I can do

http://www.htaccesstools.com/hotlink-protection/

That will take care of it.

If it was listed with me, you bet your ass I would drop it. I'm not horribly forgiving when it comes to hotlinking. I can assure you this, adevil.com will never successfully submit to me. ;)

you might contact your host to make sure they enabled mod_rewrite or AllowOverride all (or some variation to remove particular limits)

Does the .htaccess get parsed at all? Do you have the RewriteEngine on statement in the .htaccess?

If you have a broken RewriteRule, does it give you an error 500?

Curious minds want to know. :)

This is what I had the tech at my server put in .htaccess. It isn't working...


order allow,deny
allow from all
deny from www.mediasearch.com
deny from www.mediaminer.org


RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.fuckpage.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.fannyfuck.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://fuckpage.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://fannyfuck.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.fuckpage.com:80/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.fannyfuck.com:80/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://fuckpage:80/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://fannyfuck:80/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://70.85.12.42/.*$ [NC]

RewriteRule [^/]+\\.(gif|jpg)$ http://www.fuckpage.com/hub.html [R,L]

ErrorDocument 404 http://www.fuckpage.com/hub.html

Added to black list.

Thanks for that link Swedguy, I'll look into it.

hi trey,
Looks like the problem is that the rewrite rule is trying to put a html page in an image spot. You need to create an image to appear in place of the hotlinked one. My advice is to create a banner with your url written out with click here to visit the site this image was taken from or something to that effect. Bit of an awkward one, as it's going to appear on a freesite(s), but if nothing else it should alert the other LLs on that recip table to the fact he is hotlinking, and when he eventually clears his cache he'll realise what's happened.
Could be he's just too new to know better, although that doesn't excuse it of course.
Also, you'll need to put the hotlink image in a seperate folder, and have a rule to allow that image to be hotlinked, otherwise the anti-hotlink rule will cause the red x to appear.

The domain was registered in August 2002... and the whois looks extremely iffy to me :(

Trey4u, check the allowoverrides in your virtual directory, it's possible your .htaccess isn't being read

I have a rule against hotlinking your recip table images and I reject sites if I notice that they're doing that. I usually don't take the time to look at the properties of an image unless I see broken ones, though, so I'm sure that some slip by. It's hard to believe that there are webmasters too lazy to bother uploading their recips to their own server.

Exactly. That's the part that gets me. Why hotlink such a tiny image with barely and bandwidth usage even with thousands and thousands of hits? I'm thinking that maybe they 'borrowed' trey4u's recip table from one of his own free sites and forgot to change the img src to their own site. One can only hope that it's general idiocy at fault here.

No, wasn't my recip table that was copied. I don't mix text recips, gif or html recips. I keep like kinds together.Text are all together, gif's together and html recips all together. I just think it looks better.

What I'm going to do is replace the hot linked images with images that are really nasty. Like "tubgirl", a really nasty pic.

To be honest, I'd be tempted to put up an image with your url on it, as the tubgirl pic won't benefit you except to cause a problem for the thief. Stick up a 600x600 image with your url on it, even just a white backround with the text on it, and you may get some type-in traffic (as well as still causing the thief a problem). 1 extra bookmarker is better than none :)