Is this guy hot linking to you?

[Dzinerbear]

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

[Xstr8guy]

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.

[Lee]

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

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

[Chilihost]

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:

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

cheers!

Luke

[Xstr8guy]

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.

[gel]

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?

[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

[BDBionic]

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.

[gel]

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

Dzinerbear,

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

[Dzinerbear]

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

[Lee]

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

[jIgG]

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

[Chilihost]

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

[dirtygeek]

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