TGP/MGP owners. Your opinion please (conditional page redirect)

[Southfun]

Just installed my anti-hotlink script on a customer's server and while discussing the various setup options we felt the need to ask for a confirmation from the MGP/TGP owners.

In some few cases, if the script detects a "possible" attempt to exploit/by-pass the hotlink protection, instead of serving the page/movie it will generate a simple HTML page, with nothing on it, except a link saying "Click here to continue". When the surfer clicks on the link, he will be taken to the previously requested page/movie. The "click to continue" page is a one time thing for that surfer.

This is an option I encourage my customers to enable, since it makes the system 100% secure to hotlinkers but the big question he (we) have is : Is it/will it be considered as "cheating" by a reviewer that may end up seeing that "click me" page?

The page is generated by the script and as I said before has no ads or js or anything else on it except a pure link.

I can PM you the conditions that will trigger such an action, but prefer not to put it in public

PS. : The customer did not want to risk being black-listed or anything so I have turned that feature off, untill we are sure it is ok with the major MGP/TGP owners.

[cd34]

Just out of curiosity, when a site is being spidered by a bot and it gets that click here to continue page, and continues spidering, how does that prevent hotlinking? The bot still downloads the file.

The type of hotlinking most people are trying to prevent is from the fusker sites where people set their bots up to suck down all the content they can. Since those bots follow links, what have you stopped?

I guess the honest surfers that are surfing fusker with an actual browser might be stopped.

[Southfun]

Originally Posted by cd34

Just out of curiosity, when a site is being spidered by a bot and it gets that click here to continue page, and continues spidering, how does that prevent hotlinking? The bot still downloads the file.

The type of hotlinking most people are trying to prevent is from the fusker sites where people set their bots up to suck down all the content they can. Since those bots follow links, what have you stopped?

I guess the honest surfers that are surfing fusker with an actual browser might be stopped.

If its a bot spidering the page ( both "bad" and SE bots ) then it will get to the page. And yeah, it sure can download the movie if it feels like it, but I can't see why a hotlinker would do that?

Hotlinking = domain A has links to content on domain B. So domain A "serves" content to it's surfers while domain B pays the bandwidth bill. If server A uses a bot to dl the movies, it still has to serve them from it's own server, using it's own bandwidth. And then it's called "content theft" and not "hotlinking".

Fusker scripts don't download anything (where did you see/hear that?). They generate html pages with links to pictures on other domains. It's the user's browser that reads these links (img src) and dl the images. And all surfers that visit fusker sites do use "actual browsers".

And yeah, the script does stop fusker sites as well ( thats not it's main purpose), but still...try fuskering this page : http://www.bustyisland.com/freeporn/...dan/index.html ( or any other page on that TGP ) |king|