jdMorgan - 3:06 am on Nov 4, 2002 (gmt 0)

Busynut,

I also block image hot-linkers, but... I allow those accesses listed above so that people who use those search engine caches and various language-translation resources will see an attractive-looking result. My concern with images being hot-linked is purely one of bandwidth - at one point I had a ton of people using our images on their "profile" pages on Yahoo, various sports portals, etc. I just got tired of the bandwidth leak and chasing down all the extraneous and irrelevant referals in my logs. All I can suggest is to try these services out, and see if they merit your re-appraisal.

For images which have some intrinsic value, other methods such as watermarking should be employed.

Some good new about regular expressions and mod_rewrite rules - they are far easier to write than to read (it's true). :)

Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

This means that one or more of your custom ErrorDocuments is still being blocked in .htaccess or by the server configuration.

It sounds like something is fishy with the server config... The code I posted is exactly what I use on my sites, and if I put an access block on any file using my top-level-directory .htaccess file, then that file gets blocked, no matter what directory it is in. I don't know why it's not working for you. The only possible work-around I know of (so that you won't have to include the bad-bots list in each of the subdirectory .htaccess files) is to add the directive "RewriteOptions inherit" to your .htaccess files in subdirectories only.

As far as adoption goes, sure - but you'd be better off with a puppy rather than a salty old dog like me! ;)

Jim