Image hotlinked by popular site

How to stop these morons?

[caribguy]

This is not your average hotlinking question, I know how to deal with those.

In this particular case, a foreign website owner has decided to use my animated gif that is displayed while visitors wait for the results of an ajax request.

While the impact of each request is minimal (say 300 bytes), it adds up fast because of the popularity of the other site.

I want this to stop, and have started redirecting the requests. Their visitors now get a nice little thumbnail from rotten dot com... However, even after several weeks, nobody on the offending website seems to have noticed.

What other options do I have?

[htmlbasictutor]

I do what is shown here:

You can stop others from hotlinking your site's files by placing a file called .htaccess in your Apache site root (main) directory. The period before the name means the file is hidden, so you may want to edit your file as htaccess.txt, upload it to your server, then rename the txt file to .htaccess in your directory. Contact your web host on how to access your directories and configure your .htaccess file.

[edited by: tedster at 2:34 am (utc) on Mar 19, 2011]

[caribguy]

Hello htmlbasictutor, and welcome to the forums! [webmasterworld.com]

Let's try this again:

This is not your average hotlinking question, I know how to deal with those.

The site appears to be a forum, and the image in question was embedded in a series of posts by one of their users. I just replaced the 'rotten' image by one that is 1px * 20000px (195 bytes) which does wonders to their forum layout. Let's see if someone notices now...

In any case, redirecting is not my preferred option. What if I block these requests in the firewall instead?

[phranque]

some firewalls will allow referrer blocking.

if that's not an option you can provide a 403 Forbidden status code response.
if you have mod_rewrite installed you can use the [F] (forbidden) flag on a RewriteRule for that.

[edited by: phranque at 7:54 am (utc) on Mar 19, 2011]

[creeking]

temporarily replace it with a gif that is 1 pixel wide, 1000 pixels tall.


see if it screws up their formatting. make it invisible. :)

[Jane_Doe]

Other alternatives -

I sometimes just rename the gif and put an ad for my site in the old gif. Why turn down a chance for free advertising?

Or just replace the gif with something the other viewers would find particularly annoying, like a pious religious message showing up on an expletive laden gamer forum.

[caribguy]

Thanks phranque, I have 'forbidden' rules in place for referrers like weblo and picsdigger.

Those types of sites might generate about 100 entries a day in my logs, not a big deal. However, this forum could generate several thousand entries and it ticks me off...

I use ipf on FreeBSD as the firewall, but have not been able to figure out how to drop packets based on the referring site.

[g1smd]

The browser used by users of the other forum will have cached the image.

It may be weeks or months before some regular users see the image.

[caribguy]

A pious message, that's a great idea :) Was thinking of a seized by homeland security image myself...

[bwnbwn]

Site has been hacked your computer is now comprimised would be a good one.

[LifeinAsia]

Or better- "Your computer has contracted a virus from [foreign website hotlinking image] that has resulted in a security breach!"