preventing hotlinking

404 or 403?

[RammsteinNicCage]

I changed the directory that I have many images stored in. A lot of people still link to the old images, particularly in forums as avatars. This, of course, fills up my error logs with a LOT of garbage that is not very useful for me. So, I was wondering if it would make sense to make these images get a 403 error code instead of a 404 error code? There wouldn't be any bandwidth differences or anything like that, would there?

Jennifer

[pete_m]

No, there'd be no difference in bandwidth whether you return a 403 or 404 code.

I suppose a 404 is the more technically accurate response, since a 403 implies that a resource is actually there.