Hotlinking and bandwidth theft

[mjohn]

I have noticed through my weblogs that we have become the victim of bandwidth theft using hotlinking.

I know there are various methods (not sure yet if these will work on our server host) of stopping this with .htaccess, Javascript, PHP. I also know there is some commercialy available software (hotlink reverser is one) and wondered if these programs can be used with Actinic?.

Or does anyone else have other alternative methods to stop this.

thanks in advance.

MJ

www.oneStopSafetyShop.co.uk

[DaveT]

Apache server supports htaccess rules that prevent this. Do a Google search for "htaccess hotlinking" or see this link:

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum92/912.htm

There are also posts on this forum.

[Buzby]

I had this happen a little while ago with someone using my pictures on ebay.

I edited the picture to lower the quality and then added text saying this picture has been stolen from www.mydomain.com

I left these pictures on the server but renamed the originails for me to use on the web site.

[retekdirect]

That's what i'd do ^ Replace the images with "This image was stolen" or "Hotlinking is naughty" - they'll soon get the idea

Maybe send them a polite email first, but where's the fun in that...

[mjohn]

That's what i'd do ^ Replace the images with "This image was stolen" or "Hotlinking is naughty" - they'll soon get the idea

Maybe send them a polite email first, but where's the fun in that...

Thats what I did, worked a treat but it does rely on me having to trawl through the web logs, I am quite interested in some of the software available such as hot link reverser but have no idea if it is any good or would even work with Actinic?.

[jont]

you can set up the .htaccess rule to prevent the linking of your images and if they do they are automatically replaced with an alternate image which can say "stolen from XYZ" ... or something more nasty... this then allows you to use your own images as intended and stops everyone else.

This will still steal some bandwidth as the weblogs are still showing your image until the site gets fed up of your replaced abusive images and deletes them. Any form of software to counter hot linking will surely effect bandwidth also and that is the main issue of stopping it in the first place.

I would set up an .htaccess rule and wait it out for a month when most of the hot linked images will hopefully have been removed.

[Jacques]

htaccess is the easiest way to go if the thief does not stop after you contacted him.

However it may be more fun to rename the stolen images and to give very offensive images the previous names (I did it once, and the thief stopped immediately).

Unfortunately all this does not prevent someone to copy your images and put it on another site. It's not hotlinking anymore but it's theft Since a few months we put tags on our new images with our site name so it solves both problems.