Forum Moderators: phranque
Recently my logs have been flooded with mostly people on forums who like to use some of my sites images as there avatar and what not.
I'm considering using a script that will change any image linked to from an external site to a "please dont link directly to images" picture.
But I'm worried about doing this, because I'm afraid what it will do to my images in "Google Image Search" and other things...
What are the pro's and con's of doing this... Is it generally suggested to just "grin and bear it" and allow people to link to images?
Thanks
I now use a product called HotLinkStop on my IIS server and it works well. It returns no image by default which helps conserve bandwidth but it can be configured to return an image. You can also configure it so that Google can still have access.
Whatever option you choose you do NOT have to grin and bear it while people steal your intellectual property and your bandwidth.
What server do you have? I do not know the MS one.... but for Apache, a couple simple mod_rewrire rules will do the trick! And yes, you can also exclude Google....
<Directory "/path/to/your/images">
Options +FollowSymLinks
### Protect Local Images
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER}!^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER}!^http://(www\.)?YOURDOMAIN.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif¦jpg)$ - [NC,F]
</Directory>
This will just return a 403.... you can edit it to return a specific image, and add more exclusions for other sites as needed!
dave
What server do you have? I do not know the MS one.... but for Apache, a couple simple mod_rewrire rules will do the trick! And yes, you can also exclude Google....
<Directory "/path/to/your/images">
Options +FollowSymLinks
### Protect Local Images
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER}!^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER}!^http://(www\.)?YOURDOMAIN.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif¦jpg)$ - [NC,F]
</Directory>
This will just return a 403.... you can edit it to return a specific image, and add more exclusions for other sites as needed!
dave
