Sorry, no more hot-linking, please

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May 23, 2004

Yup that’s it, no more hot-linking of images (and CSS files as well) on this site, please. Thanks to pippo’s
How can I prevent hot-linking images? post, any hot-link requests to this site will be redirected to this image below instead:

Image shown in place of hot-linked images

I know there have been cases of legitimate hot-linking (at least in my view they are legitimate), such as from forum threads (legitimate because I don’t expect your run-of-the-mill forum member to have webspace). So this “sorry” goes to you guys. If I notice hot-linking from forum threads in the future, I’ll be sure to add you to the allowed list of referrers. In fact, I’ve already added http://gathering.tweakers.net/forum/ and http://mozillapl.org/forum/ to the “allowed list” in my .htaccess.

I did this because there have been people who have been leeching my image files, list bullets and even my CSS(!), and I think that is bad form. If you want an image from this site, download it, and upload it on your server. So far every image and screenshot I’ve ever posted is available for “free” despite the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 1.0 license, and should be in the future unless I turn into the Picasso of graphic design soon.

Posted by Chu Yeow at May 23, 2004 SGT |

Permalink |

| Category: Web development

6 Comments & TrackBacks ()

How can you easily tell if your images are being leeched?

[By the way, I think you only need one instance of “RewriteEngine On” at the top of your .htaccess file, not every time you start a new set of rules. Correct me if you know I’m wrong though!]

Posted by: David on May 23, 2004 10pm

I use AWStats and pages leeching images (or any other files) appear at the bottom - the ‘Pages’ column is empty, but there are ‘Hits’.

As for the ‘RewriteEngine on’ thing, you are correct, but I just leave them there for occasions when I take chunks of stuff out of my .htaccess.

Posted by: Cheah Chu Yeow on May 23, 2004 10pm

Greetings!

It’s a great trick :) But I were wondering if you could allow my URL as well? I’m running my own little Mozilla Planet at http://q1n.org/mozilla/planet/ and since you did this I can’t see the images :)

Thanks!

Posted by: Vidar Braut Haarr on May 24, 2004 7am

I’ve subscribed to the “Redemption in a Blog” RSS feed using a server-side aggregator and consequently the images in the feed now appear with the default graphic. No biggie as I’ll just visit the page to view the graphics if needed; however, I’m wondering if you might not be getting a fair number of image hits this way as well.

Posted by: filmgoerjuan on May 24, 2004 8am

Sorry about that, I just recently (last 3-4 days) added your site to my news aggregator, so I’m suscribing to the RSS feed like filmogeorjuan. And your pictures come with it.

Posted by: hone on May 24, 2004 10am

Vidar Braut Haarr: I’ve added your site to the “allowed” list. :)

filmgoerjuan and hone: Frankly (and stupidly of me), I never thought about aggregators when I applied the hot-linking rules. I’ll be switching over to a “disallowed list” instead, where only certain sites will be disallowed from hot-linking tommorrow.

Thanks much for bringing this to my attention :)

Posted by: Cheah Chu Yeow on May 25, 2004 1am

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