Using Summary, How Can I Filter Visits Due to Hotlinking?

This behavior is skewing my visitor count!

[Vetteman]

Recently, I've had several commentors on blogs hotlink my images. I'm working on how to stop hotlinking, but how can I filter this in my log analyser program?

I'm using Summary, which I've found to be an excellent program.

It seems like I'm getting many more visitors than I really am, because they are only viewing my pictures, while not even viewing my site.

Thanks!

[larryhatch]

Hello Vetteman: I can't help with your statistics issues, I don't
know anything about Summary.
I have the exact same hot-linking issues, and found a way to benefit from them.
If I find my image hotlinked in my access log files, I visit the blog
or whatever and see if they give credits and a link back.
IF NOT, I register to the forum and gently coerce them into providing a
nice link or three, reminding them of good netizenship and mentioning
the word COPYRIGHT (in lower case) in passing.
IF THEY DO link back, I thank them and suggest more links to related pages.
I've never had a complaint. It was THEY who hotlinked after all. -Larry

[leadegroot]

When you look at your logs, the referrer for images should be one of your pages.
If the referrer is a different domain then that is probably hotlinking.
The one exception is that if your genuinely have cases of people referring to images directly, then this doesn't differentiate those instances.

[cgrantski]

I don't know about Summary, but I can think of three ways to un-skew your data.

1) turn off logging of your image files. This will do it, but is undesirable overall - there are uses for logs that include image files.

2) filter out images in Summary, so that it doesn't count them or visits that consist of only an image request.

3) See if Summary will give you a report of "visit counts for different lengths of visits as measured by page views of the visit" and look at the number corresponding to "number of visits with zero page views." This is useful because it gives you a number that you can subtract from your overall visit count to get an accurate count of real visits, and it also tells you how bad your image-linking problem is.

Also, if Summary can be made to give you a report of "referrer pages for visits of length 0 page views" you'll have a handy list of the exact pages on other sites that are causing this problem.