Determining Source of Hotlinking on Forums

[DXL]

I manage a retail website with hundreds of cool product images that are hotlinked regularly. The larger images are watermarked with the site's URL, however the product thumbnails aren't. When checking AWSTATS to see who is hotlinking, I never get the full URL of a thread that includes hotlinked images, I only get a link to that forum's homepage. My question is in two parts:

1. Is there a way to use Google to find out what page of the forum is hotlinking images from my client's site?

2. Is there a way to move all of the thumbnails on the site to a subfolder, and disallow hotlinking for ONLY that folder?

[DXL]

Suggestions?

[Quadrille]

1. I don't think there is a way of using Google in that way, unless webmaster tools gives that info? Probably just as well - you could rapidly go mad pursuing each instance of hotlinking!

2. I don't know if it's possible to deny hotlinking by folder. One workaround would be to stop ALL hotlinking from the domain, and move watermarked images to another domain that does allow hotlinking.

[jezra]

You should be able to parse your serverlogs to find the referrer that is hotlinking your images.

You can deny hotlinking by folder by using a well crafted .htaccess file on Apache or by using a third party product for IIS.