Cpanel Hotlink Protection Disables Flash Images In Firefox

And other Gecko browsers

[HuskyPup]

What a torrid Monday trying to resolve why a new flash site worked perfectly on the test domain yet wouldn't display images on the real domain in Firefox, Navigator and K-Meleon!

In all my other browsers the images worked fine.

After many hours of head scratching I compared the files on the two uploaded sites and noticed an htaccess file on the real domain. Checking to see what it was revealed Cpanel's hotlink image protection which I have enabled on all sites.

I deleted this file and immediately the real domain worked perfectly. Has anyone else experienced this or have any idea why it may be causing this issue?

Definitely a bug methinks.

My bill is in the post Mozilla!

[rocknbil]

I think we'd have to see the .htaccess rules.

It's likely because it's disallowing incorrectly, that is, let's take one scenario:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^https*://(www\.)?example\.com [NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpe?g|png|swf|flv)$ /alternate_image.jpg [NC,L]

Note the bolded line.

The * in https means "zero or more 's' characters" so this rule will be ignored for http AND https if the other conditions match.

(www\.)? this means "one or zero of the preceding" and is intended to capture the www version and non www version.

Overall, if the referrer is from example.com or www.example.com, secure or not, and the request is for an image or .flv, this rule will not match, but all other referrers will be served alternate_image.jpg.

You're probably experiencing something like this. You also have to be careful not to disallow Google images or other external resources you might want to allow.

More info from this site [google.com] (G search in WW)