berli - 3:12 am on Jun 22, 2003 (gmt 0)

What about your server logs or web stats? The referrers should tell you what's going on.

I'd say just disable it, though. If they want to link to your mp3's, they can link to the html file on your site that points to them, if they want your images, they can host their own copy themselves.

The only case where you might not want to restrict hotlinking is if you like to link to images on your own server when posting on online forums. Since most freehosts have hotlinking disabled (and I hear that Geocities has finally caught up to the foo.jpg.txt trick) allowing hotlinking from your own server may be the only answer (but you can get around this simply by keeping website images in /img-a/ and placing a special .htaccess file in that directory, and keeping your forum images in /img-b/, blocking directory listing only in that directory, so that hotlinkers don't know what those images are and thus are less likely to use them.