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May 8, 2005
Hotlinking

This will be of interest to perhaps 1% of you, but I'm getting irritated with people stealing my bandwidth.

If you have a website and you browse your referrer logs every now and then, you'll probably notice all kinds of hits from weird sites, usually blogs, forums, or teenagers Xanga sites that you've never heard of. Makes you feel popular for a second until you click through and see that they didn't link to your site, they just linked to an image on your site.

See, if you want to display an image on a website, you can either put it on your server or, if the image is on someone else's site, you can just enter the full URL pointing directly to the image on their server, thereby serving the image on your page with their bandwidth. I pay for my bandwidth. It's mine. When I go over my limits, it costs me. So this is bad.

For a while, when I noticed a particularly egregious offender, I would just change the name of the image, thereby breaking the image on their site. This works, but it's a pain. So now I'm looking into more serious solutions that will prevent people from doing this in the first place. I'll probably go with this technique.

That's it. I'm done. Just had to get that out. If you have a website and you "hotlink" images, stop it. It's basically stealing. Download the image and put it on your own server.

That is all.

Comments

Previous Comments

I might have to try your method. Mine is a little more time consuming than just changing the filename -- I have a hugely disgusting image of ... let's just say "a moment of bestiality" that I sub in when I find the Xanga kiddies hotlinking me. The downside is that eventually the sicker kiddies start hotlinking *that* on purpose. You just can't beat 'em.

Yeah, I considered something like that, but if they don't notice, it won't help my bandwidth issues, and I was concerned about instigating a retaliatory hotlinking backlash from the little punks.

FYI, I implemented the linked method, and it seems to be working great. I can whitelist sites that I don't mind using my images, and if someone legitimately links to an image (rather than embeds it), the image is served with a credit. Nice.

I think that may have a bit to do with the phpBB based forums, which only let you put in links if you wish to display graphics, but not upload them onto the forum directly.

I find a hybrid solution to work for the time being. I find it time consuming and tedious to track down the kids at Xanga and MySpace, and if I display anything too offensive, you're right, they eventually like it and get a charge out of it, ad then THAT image it hotlinked. Instead, I created a large graphic which is essentially a copyright infringement warning notice that says "Stolen Image Deactivated: Theft of Bandwidth. Your account will be closed in 24 hours unless properties are redefined." It almost ALWAYS works. For one thing, the images they are taking, are high resolution, so I have the room for the text. I can even make one for Xanga and one for MySpace, and the kids are afraid of a "notice" from those sites threatening to shut down the works of art they claim their profiles to be.