Someone Linking to a file on my website?

[andmunn]

Hello,

I've been reviewing my stats (awstats), and i have a site which shows up like this:

www.sitename.com 1 ¦ 37

I'm assuming this means 1 page loaded, and 37 hits from the site - I have a feeling they are looking to something on my site (i.e.// an image) - is there anyway i can find out where this hit is coming from? (i.e.// what particular images / document they are linking to?)

Thanks,
Andrew.

[mack]

If you have access to your log files you could download then and open then with a text editor.

You should be able to use "find" to locate the referring url and find out exactly what file they where linking to.

Are you certain it is not just a link to your site?

Mack.

[andmunn]

Hi Mack,

Thanks for your help - i just checked the logs, and it definately not visits - I just noticed one of hte users it hotlinking there forum avatar on another forum, from the image uploaded on my forum - hence about 1000 hits a month...
not a big deal - but was just curious.

Andrew.

[lammert]

You can turn a problem in your advantage. If you are on Apache, you could add the following three lines to your .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www\.¦forum\.)?othersite\.com/
RewriteRule \.(gif¦jpg¦jpeg¦png¦swf)$ /avatars/nice-replacement.jpg

(replace all the ¦ with the version without the hole in it)

Create your picture nice-replacement.jpg with a message like "Visit forum your-forum-here"

Everytime someone loads a page from the other forum, the avatars loaded from your site are replaced with this message. In my experience it sometimes takes months before all hotlinks on the other forum are replaced by other images and you get free advertisments in that period.

One time a forum linked its background image from one of my sites. Quite an interesting effect when I replaced the background image with something of my own choice with the method mentioned above...