on-line auction linking to pix on my web site

Revenge - in for a surprise now

[teylyn]

Going through my logs the other day, I found that I had a lot hits for a particular picture on my website coming from the world's most popular online auction site, the one whose name ends with "bay". Apparently, somebody had referenced to my picture instead of taking the trouble of copying it to some other place. Then they went to run dozens of auctions with it.

As a first measure I just renamed the picture, but that just got me a whole lot of 404s for the original picture. As a second thought, I found my revenge could be a bit sweeter.

So instead of the nice and shiny product photo that he uses on his auction, I found a grubby, dirty, messy scene that's still ok for kids to look at, but that will not exactly add spark to his auction. I gave the pic the same name as the original photo, uploaded it and - voila - there is his auction with the link to my grubby pic. Nice.

I'll probably still have that traffic for a while, but at least I feel I've paid the lazy bugger back some!

If people steal they might as well try to be clever about it and not leave their traces all over the place.

I have the right to name the pictures on my web site any way I want, and also change them around at my whim, don't I? Or are there any recriminations in it for me?

cheers

teylyn

[old_expat]

"I took lcampers' recommendation and went to look at the Apache forum to maybe figure out how to use .htaccess to stop hotlinking, and I finally figured it out. One line was missing from the little file. It's a relief not to have to deal with anymore. Now it's just the text thieves to worry about. "

I would appreciate seeing your script. I had one that worked too good .. no images on the Google cache of my index page.

The script required *specifically allowing* certain URLs to link to images. I just couldn't figure out how to allow all datacenters for all the major SEs.

[HRoth]

old_expat, I did not even know about the Google images and cache thing. Thanks for mentioning that. I went and looked around, and I added the two penultimate lines to my bit:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER}!^http://(www\.)?mysite\.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER}!google\. [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER}!search\?q=cache [NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif¦jpe?g)$ - [NC,F]

They allow the images to appear in Google's cache and Google's image search. I guess it would be the same with Yahoo and MSN. That's supposed to be a solid pipe after gif.