MacBros’ Place |

If you’re not familiar with the term Hotlinking, in short, it is when somebody directly links a file from your site to display on theirs, usually without permission. Hotlinking is something that I do not tolerate. It means people are leeching my bandwidth which I pay for. In simple terms, it is stealing.

Hot-linking

Hot-linking is a term used on the Internet. Hot-linking is when someone uses a link to an image that is saved on another website instead of saving a copy of the image on the website that the picture will be shown on. For example, instead of saving picture.gif and loading it on to their own website, the person uses a link to the picture as http://website.com/picture.gif. Hot-linking uses the bandwidth of the person who owns the website where the picture is stored. This costs that person money. This is why many website owners are using .htaccess files and uploading it to their websites.

In some cases website owners use the .htaccess file to replace any hot-linked images with an offensive image to deter any other website owners from hot-linking.

From - Wikipedia

I have recently updated my .htaccess files to prevent people from stealing bandwidth from my server by Hotlinking files from my site to theirs and one blogger just happen to see just how hotlinking works first hand.

It’s actually a simple code you can place into a .htaccess file to prevent people from hotlinking files from any or all of your directories.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?allowedsite.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?allowedsite2.com [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(swf|flv|gif|png|png|jpe?g)$ /path to hotlink file/hotlinkimage.bmp [NC,R,L]

I’m actually flattered at just how much time they must have spent on researching my website and the time they took to write such humorous crap. They even took the time to design a monogrammed hat for me. Gee. My very own MacBros hat.

I’m actually still laughing at this person.

I mean really! They got caught with their pants down and they get all hot under the collar and flam me because they were caught stealing from me.

It’s really sad in my opinion. (Which you are entitled to)

The image they were caught stealing was my American/Canadian Idiot logo that I threw together for an old post.

The image that is displayed on the offending site is made up to have the thief look like an idiot. Spelling and all. They point out how I spelled ‘Your’. I spelled it ‘Yor’ instead of ‘Your’. Big fucking deal! It’s meant to detour hotlinkers from stealing, so they take down the link. Not a spelling lesson. It’s not like the damn thing is supposed to stay up on their site. And by the way, it’s supposed to look like THEY made it. Duh!

The part I found really amusing was the part they tried to justify hotlinking. As if they is OK with them. I dunno’ about you, but when somebody steals from me, it pisses me off. That’s the whole reason for the .htaccess file.

If you like an image you saw on my site, just copy it and save it to your own server. It would be nice if you let your reader/viewers know where you got it too. It’s just common courtisy.

And speaking of common courtisy, since The Street Kings were so kind to give some linkage, I’ll just return the favor. Here’s the rant they wrote entitled, “Hot links! Get your hot links here!”

So here you have a quick tip on hotlinking, the results, and the effects.

What do you do to prevent people from stealing bandwidth or other images and files from your site?

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