dam hotlinkers - I need help!

[ponygirl]

Hope someone can help me...

I keep getting images hotlinked from Chatropolis, I go in and change the file name when I start to see it show up in my stats & send em to my 404 but what a pain in the ass to have to do this every few days...

I have the basic htaccess file on my root that should prevent this, right??
or is there something I should be adding to this

when I put the image url thru the hotlink checker it does not come up as an image so what exactly are they seeing when they click on it?

I'm quite pissed, have written to the site admin but I know it's a widespread problem. I can't see the actual thread cuz I'll be damned if I pay money just to get into the site to see it...


aaaaaggggghhhh! lol

any suggestions??

thanks
Ponygirl

[cd34]

in your .htaccess, put:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://YOURDOMAIN.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.YOURDOMAIN.com [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.([gG][iI][fF]|[jJ][pP][gG])$ - [F]

alternatively

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} chatropolis.com [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F]

[swedguy]

I see that you send all hotlink traffic to http://www.liquisexxx.com/index.html

What happens when someone hotlinks you is that instead of the image it will redirect the image request to http://www.liquisexxx.com/index.html, which isn't an image so it will show a broken image. BUT it will still load that page.

http://www.liquisexxx.com/index.html is 14k big. So lets say you get 10k hotlinked image views 10.000*14k = 140MB

That's what happens

[ponygirl]

cd34 - thank you!!!!! I knew there was a way to keep out certain undesirables but as I don't exactly "get" the scripting end of things I need it spelled out for me. I'll use this one for sure

swedguy - I know it's probably not the greatest traffic, but if they're going to my index page, at least it's my site & not just a pic?

is this what is telling them to go to the index pg & should I tell it to go to my 404?

RewriteRule (gif|jpg|png|swf|mpg|avi|GIF|JPG|PNG|SWF|MPG|AVI)$ http://www.liquisexxx.com/index.html [R,L]

this is my 404

thanks for your help!

Ponygirl


haha - the 404 is bigger than the index pg...

[swedguy]

Originally posted by ponygirl
swedguy - I know it's probably not the greatest traffic, but if they're going to my index page, at least it's my site & not just a pic?

They will never see your index page if the image is hotlinked.

Not sure how to explain it, but I'll do my best

If Chatropolis hotlinks one of you images, it comes from one of their HTML pages inside an <img src="http://yourdomain.com/01.jpg">. Inside an IMG tag, only images are allowed. So what happens when the image request comes to your site is that they get redirected to your index.html (because of the hotlinks protection). So the index.html is loaded inside the IMG tag, which doesn't show up properly because it's not an image, so a broken image will appear on the Chatropolis page.

But if they have added links to your images <a href="http://yourdomain.com/01.jpg"> if they click the link they will get redirected to your index page and they will see it.

The last one is the way Google Images works, if they click on the "See full-size image".

So if bandwidth is a concern, you should redirect hotlink traffic to a light-weight html page with few images, since both the HTML page and the images will be loaded.

If bandwidth isn't a concern, send the traffic to where ever it makes you most money

[ponygirl]

swedguy -
ok I getcha...you explained it very well! one question...just out of curiousity, if my html page is loaded into an image tag, does that draw bandwidth?

It doesn't seem to be too much of a problem, I just don't like seeing it in my stats & it ticks me off, thats all |pissed| cuz I always see in the rules to these chat groups n stuff -no hotlinking- I guess I'm too anal cuz I am a real stickler for rules

but that is excellent info to know & I'm glad you took the time to reply with it...I'm learning so much here lately that I'm actually starting to understand it lol

I'll just mellow out before I check my stats & maybe it won't bug me as much

[swedguy]

Originally posted by ponygirl
just out of curiousity, if my html page is loaded into an image tag, does that draw bandwidth?

Yes

[hermit]

what i did when i was getting hotlinked from one of those hotlink pic post bulletin boards is instead of a url i put a pic up there for them

RewriteRule (gif|jpg|png|swf|mpg|avi|GIF|JPG|PNG|SWF|MPG|AVI)$ http://www.mydomain.com/spam-pic.jpg [R,L]

the pic had my logo on it and it said

"daily updated free porn. hand picked, surfer friendly free porn pics, vids, stories and live cams. over 1 million visitors a week cant be wrong!"

they removes your links in a hurry when you do that. havent had any problems since.

p.s. i dont really get a million visitors a week