Israeli Portal stealing my bandwith

[bts111]

I cannot believe that the largest portal in Israel (in Alexa top 110) has hotlinked something on my site, and is ripping off a ridiculous amount of bandwith.

I have tried to email them but cannot read Hebrew.

I didn't even get a link to the site or any type of acknowledgement. And to make matters worse I cannot get the file of the server.

[larryhatch]

I had a similar problem with a password-protected Korean site hotlinking images.
My only remedy was musical filenames. Its fun if you have the time.

I presume many Israelis can read English, webmasters especially. -Larry

[edited by: larryhatch at 8:27 am (utc) on Nov. 15, 2005]

[bill]

A search here on stop hotlinking [google.com] turns up several threads which may help you. You just need to block this ISP from hotlinking your image(s). It should be fairly straightforward depending on your server.

[bts111]

If they did the right thing I would have received over 100,000 + lovely unique visitors for the day.

Their actions are going to cost me hundreds of dollars. I might send them an invoice ;)

[bts111]

Thanks Bill. I will check it out.

[dunhill]

I had a similiar problem, I worked out what photos they were stealing and replaced them with a new image like:

"This site is stealing images from my website"

or some Inappropriate image with the above text. It really depends on how cruel you want to be to what the image is ;-)

By the time the realize many people have seen the image.

They never did it again.

[bts111]

I wouldn't want to publicly defame the site in question -- they are just way too big.

I am shocked that they are resorting to these types of tactics.

[kaled]

Change the url. In its place put something that reads "#*$! site are bandwidth thieves" or whatever you think is appropriate.

Kaled.

[badass101]

Duplicate the image, place a message on the bottom with Photoshop that says 'Image from: www.widget.com' and use a .htaccess rule to push them to the new image.

[HRoth]

A great many Israelis can get by in English, esp. people in business. You should be able to get a contact email address for their outfit from WHOIS info. You can get that from samspade.org. Just go there and put in the domain name in the slot next to "Magic at WHOIS," and it will give you WHOIS info.

[JAB Creations]

IoI...
[webmasterworld.com...]

This thread I linked posts why I think portal sites are typically trash.