Forum Moderators: phranque
I know the common .htaccess tricks
When a commercial real estate site pulls pictures from my site, I make the usual .htacceess on referrer
trick to give them a picture from a miser dog house instead of the photo from a luxury villa.
But how to deal with all this forums?
The bandwith does not hurt, but I would like to have not only
<img src=http://my-web-site/example.jpg>
But
<a href=http://my-web-site/example.htm><img src=http://my-web-site/example.jpg></a>
For example you are saying someone places this code into a forum.
<img src=http://my-web-site/example.jpg>
and you want it to become
<a href=http://my-web-site/example.htm><img src=http://my-web-site/example.jpg></a>
Is that corrent?
If so, I know that you can not do this. It is not possible.
What happens when they hot link you is they put in your URL and image location and call it remotely. The only thing you can do is change the request when the src="" part of the image tag requests a file from your server. It will not be possible for you to wrap the img tag on the site that hot linked you in an <a> tag.
You can return anything you want when a file is requested from your server, but you cannot alter the source of the page that is making the request.
So when they ask for <img src=http://my-web-site/example.jpg> you can do anything you want to the src="" portion of the tag but that is it.
A funny story that happened to me about a month ago that is related and I love telling this story and I do with any chance given the last couple of weeks.
So I have this very busy site that sells niche products. One day day I notice a really high amount of referals from this one site. I go and look and they are selling similar products, which is fine. Then I look and notice they have smaple PDFs for some of the products. I have sample PDFs as well so I look at the PDF link and it is linked to the one on my site.
So I do an access rule, and maybe I went a little far but this is debatable, but I wrote a rule that if you requested the pdf from her site I would just redirect you to the product checkout page on my site of the product PDF sample you requested from this other ladies site. Now since the hotlink was opening in the same window I managed to grab quite a few of her visitors.
A few weeks go by and I get a call from the lady who runs the hot linking website, and she actually was calling to complain that my PDFs were 'broken' and she wanted me to fix it. I told her she was stealing my bandwidth and that all she has to do is save copies of the PDF and place them on her server and link to them from there and I wouldn't even have known.
Then the kicker. She actually says to me.
"But then that will cost me money because I have to pay for bandwidth and some of those files are so big"
Well no s*** lady why you think I was pisssed to begin with?
As for hotlinking. You can do something similar, not a link, but you could do this:
Write a rule that internally redirects all the hotlinked images to a script (Perl, or PHP, or whatnot), then using the GD (or another image library) add any text you want to the image and serve it.
I just make a gif image with the words "hey everyone checkout this page mysite.com/something-unique/
I just asked in an other forum about how to dynamic change the image on referer
and to put my web site address below the image
