Hotlinking problem

[Raymond]

A person is hotlinking our images as his avatar and signature on a very popular forum. While I do not really mind the bandwidth that he is taking from us, this activity has totally screwed up our log analyzer. I think each hotlink request from a different IP is counted as a unique visit, since that forum is quite popular, it has greatly affected our statistics calculations. Our last month's conversion rate was down 220%, solely because there there were 1000s of fake visits we get every single day.

How would you handle this? Anyway to capitalize this link?

[osfp]

delete the image and replace it by another with a diferent name "me_and_cat.gif",i had the same problem on a forum i did so and the guys change to there own pictures

[BillPosters]

You should be able to disable/prevent hotlinking via your hosting control panel.
e.g. CPanel has a selection of settings under the title 'HotLink Protection'.

Read your control panel's user guide to see if it offers you that facility.

[edited by: BillPosters at 8:36 am (utc) on Sep. 2, 2004]

[Lord Majestic]

I think each hotlink request from a different IP is counted as a unique visit, since that forum is quite popular, it has greatly affected our statistics calculations.

You might want to make sure that you use proper web analytics software that won't count visitors that only viewed an image. This is not to say you should not deal with that problem, just bear in mind that should you start doing email campaigns then you are likely to be hotlinking images to your own site as well.

[karmov]

I'd deal with the bad behaviour (hotlinking) because although it's not a problem today, it could grow into one. Also take a long hard look at what your log analyzer is doing for you. If it's giving you uniques for people viewing images, it would probably be a good idea to see if there's a configuration option you might be able to use to help, or start investigating a better package altogether.

[kc0eks]

you can also use .htaccess to prevent this, and display whatever image you choose :)
while i cant remember how you do it, it shouldnt be hard to find in say google :)