Greenguy's Board - Can I or should I block hotlinking?

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- - Can I or should I block hotlinking? (http://www.greenguysboard.com/board/showthread.php?t=55327)

Can I or should I block hotlinking?

It's finally happened. Some forums are hotlinking my images with no link back to my site.

I think I can figure out blocking hotlinking with htaccess.

However, will this affect my free site and tgp submits? Do legitimate link list and tgp owners hotlink my images instead of directing to my domain?

I want to nip this bandwidth theft in the butt, before it starts costing me.

You make $0 from the other sites hotlinking your images.

http://www.greenguysboard.com/board/...em#faq_hotlink was developed a few years back and still holds up pretty well.

Code:

RewriteEngine on

# leave this line in allow empty referrers, remove to disallow empty referrers

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$ [NC]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.*@)?([a-z0-9-]+\.)?yourdomain\.com(:[0-9]+)?(/.*)?$ [NC]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.*@)?1\.2\.3\.4(:[0-9]+)?(/.*)?$

RewriteRule .*\.(asf|mpg|mpeg|wmv|avi|rm|gif|jpeg|jpg|zip)$ - [NC,F,L]

The 1.2.3.4 should be replaced with your IP address if you want -- or, you can remove that line entirely. Nowadays, it probably doesn't matter much to have that line there. Allowing the Empty referrer is probably good because a lot of privacy software tends to blank the referrer line. However, if you are being heavily hotlinked, you might disable that since some of the forum surfers won't be sending referrers specifically because they know most rules will allow the image to be hotlinked with referrers turned off.

The only tgp or linklist that i know of that hotlinks to your benefit is pichunter.

I let Google and a few other places hotlink like this board so that I can have an image in my sig but that's about it.

Sparky's htaccess file is the best I've ever seen. :)

Thanks for all the responses. I'll start working on this.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Cleo (Post 469673)

Sparky's htaccess file is the best I've ever seen. :)

That is actually the one that Raymor developed.

can somebody pls tell me why allowing google to hotlink makes sense? I mean, I did this before too but I see pics from domains that dissalow hotlinking in general (SE too) in the google image search results normally. Where exactly does google or other SE hotlink? Example?

nobody? I am really curious, just checked some domains of mine again that have hotlinking disabled for all sites besides my own and I can find images normally in the google image search

Google Cache hotlinks images, I don't know of anything else. GIS doesn't hotlink.

so what can I expect to happen when google cache can't hotlink my images? Anybody know?

Your images can appear in google image searches, not good if its a private site.