Find hotlinkers

[janbeeu]

What is the easiest way to find out who is hotlinking to your site?

[jdMorgan]

Examine your raw server access log file, look up the IP address in your favorite WHOIS service and get the domain name, which you can then do a search on to learn about the site, or just type the IP address it into your browser to go to the site.

I suggest that you use a 'safer' browser, such as Firefox with scripting disabled when doing this. If you must use Internet Explorer, then you really must disable ActiveX (Active scripting) before visiting unknown sites. I'm making the assumption here that the hotlinker is a thief to start, and may be up to various forms of no good. Better to be too careful than not careful enough...

Jim

[janbeeu]

Thanks Jim. I have a lot of IP addresses. Is there a way to see which may be hotlinking or do I have to visit them all?

[jdMorgan]

No, you need to start with your raw access logs, and find the requests that show only the image(s) being fetched and never any of your 'page' URLs, with a referrer outside your own site. Then investigate the referring sites.

I thought you were getting IP-address referrers and didn't know how to look them up.

Jim

[janbeeu]

I'm using AWStats and it gives me the referrer url's in the end report. I'll have a look at the raw data of the log but it always gives me a headache because it is hardly readable ;-)

[janbeeu]

Jim would this be possible in htacces:

Redirect /images/thumbs/maps/athensmap.gif [mysite.com...]

in other words, redirect a direct link to a page.

Jan

[Matt Probert]

You could just disable hotlinking. We find thousands of forum postings trying to include hot links to our pictures, while the pictures are public domain we refuse to pay for the bandwidth!

Matt

[janbeeu]

If they are public domain, I agree but what, like in our case, they are not?

[jdMorgan]

You can use mod_rewrite to disable or redirect image requests referred by a particular referrer. This does not work 100% of the time, but it is often 'good enough' to make the hotlinker's site look broken to the majority of his visitors. Therefore, the hotlinker will want to remove the image links so that his site doesn't look bad.

There are many threads here [google.com] on WebmasterWorld with anti-hotlinking code in them that you can review.

Jim