Is this guy hot linking to you?

Good morning people,

In looking at my logs this morning, I found another substantial number of hits from this site: http://www.footbuddies.com. I've been seeing it a few times over the past week.

It took me a bit of time to figure it out all on my own. Bu eventually I found a submission form where members can submit pictures they've found of guy's feet, and lo and behold, there in the code is my URL.

When I put up new galleries, I usually wait a day or so before uploading an htaccess file to the hidden gallery folder, I don't know why, I just did. Now, I've learned my lesson.

So, just a warning that you may want to check your logs for this guy's site.

Question: My htaccess file sends anyone who isn't coming from MANcheck or my domain to the site's index page. Do I need to add a specific line to deal with this footbuddies site? When I uploaded the htaccess file and checked his page again, the image link was broken, but I'm wondering if there's anything else I need to do to prevent this yahoo from hotlinking my stuff. What about my outside pages and galleries that aren't protected by htaccess?

Thanks
Dzinerbear

I usually wait until someone links to my members area before I put .htaccess on my sites... that way I can redirect all the cheaters to my hub site and make them bookmarkers. But then again, I've never had a serious hotlinker... I think the problem affects straight webmasters more.

Quote:

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Originally posted by Xstr8guy
I think the problem affects straight webmasters more.

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You know what, i think i tend to actually agree with you there, i honestly cant remember a time where we have had a serious issue with hotlinking happening on any of our gay sites (short of webmasters hotlinking the GWW recip button) you do bring up a good point however that we have had countless episodes of our straight sites content being hotlinked.

Things that make you go hmmm...

Regards,

Lee

one of my domains started getting hotlinked by asian bbs boards, my bandwidth went from about 2G/day to about 5G, I popped up my .htaccess and my bandwidth fell to about 1.5G/day.

Of course, I purposely left this domain without hotlink protection as I was using it for hotlinking from my other domains, that was a mistake!

Dzinerbear, to stop hotlinking without necessary stopping linking to your page you should have a line in your htaccess that looks like this:

Quote:

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RewriteRule .*\.(gif|GIF|jpg|JPG|mpg|MPG|Mpeg|mpeg|MPEG|rm|RM) $ http://www.redirect.com [R,L]

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cheers!

Luke

I think most hotlinkers/password crackers are adolescent boys. Even if they are gay, there not going to admit it to anyone... even themselves. So what would they hotlink/crack? Straight sites, I'm sure.

Maybe I'm missing something.

Why aren't you putting your .htaccess in your root directory? You can set it to use those same hotlink protections for all of your subdirectories?

You mean in: www.mysite.com/

Because it doesn't seem to work and it balls everything I up. The only way I can get them to work is to put them here.

www.mysite.com/guy1/hiddenfolder/

Cheers,
Dzinerbear

The only time it really became a problem for me was with a Taiwanese BBS.
I'd allowed for hotlinking to go on for a short while as I used it myself to promote my site. But when I woke up one day to see 80GB of bandwidth sucked up in 6 hours by this Taiwanese BBS I finally went ahead and disabled hotlinking throughout the entire site.

Quote:

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Originally posted by Dzinerbear
You mean in: www.mysite.com/

Because it doesn't seem to work and it balls everything I up. The only way I can get them to work is to put them here.

www.mysite.com/guy1/hiddenfolder/

Cheers,
Dzinerbear

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Dzinerbear,

Hit me up on ICQ. I'll help you get your .htaccess configured.

I appreciate the offer Gel. I don't have ICQ. Every time I've ever installed it over the past six years, it's screwed up my computer.

I've got AIM or MSN.

Cheers
Dzinerbear

With ICQ dont install it :)

Instead go to http://go.icq.com - Web based version it is MUCH more stable than the the desktop version IMHO :)

Regards,

Lee

cpanel has a real nifty feature that can pop .htaccess file in the root directory and end hotlinking for all subfolders/sites:groovy:

You can do a "non-hotlinking" htaccess file in your root folder and then do individual "no entry unless its from AVS/my site" htaccess files in each subfolder you want to protect.

cheers!
Luke

There are also some CHI sctipts that you can use to stop hotlinking. I've never used any of them, but I heared they work pretty well.

Maybe these sites can help you also. http://www.htmlbasix.com/disablehotlinking.shtml

http://www.cgiserverscripts.com/scri...cript_071.html