Your thoughts on hotlinking

Sells PC To Pay For Divorce Joined: Posts: 5661

Just wondering...
What do you think of hotlinking ?
How far do you go?
What if some people must surf on the internet using proxies etc...?
Then your site will show a X on all images...
So what do YOU do?

Posted: Sun Dec 11, 2005 8:14 pm

Then use a proxy that doesn't strip all HTTP headers.
BTW it's not only proxies it's also bad routers and firewalls

registered · Posted: Sun Dec 11, 2005 8:40 pm

hitwalker wrote:

So what do YOU do?

I use some images (at places like this) in my posts. I want them to be linkable. Dittos for my 'Link 2 Us' graphics. However, there are others (like my Coppermine Photo Gallery) that I don't want to be linkable, so...

I guess my answer is, it all depends... Wink

Posted: Mon Dec 12, 2005 5:26 am

mmmm,reason i ask is that a month ago i found out that 2 non nuke related sites were linking some of my sample images that i had posted in my forum..
So to solve that i added a few lines in my htaccess using a no hotlink image of 800 x 800 .....lol
But thing is...at this moment i added the line again but not certain yet...
but some websites have a banner linked so they are allowed in the referer..
So question is,whats more important...preventing the hotlinking,or that every visitor can visit...

Posted: Mon Dec 12, 2005 5:50 am

hitwalker wrote:

So question is,whats more important...preventing the hotlinking,or that every visitor can visit...

I don't know what to tell you... it's your call!

Personally, the only reason hotlinking ever bothered me was because it eats up bandwidth. However, I'm currently paying for 75 GB Bandwidth a month, but only using <= 30 GB, so it's no big deal *to me*. Wink

Posted: Mon Dec 12, 2005 6:02 am

well im not sure yet...
thing is that our dutch prices are different then in the usa,there its cheaper..
But its not an bandwidth issue.....lol
just wanted to know how what other people would do to prevent this or just let it happen..

Posted: Mon Dec 12, 2005 8:01 am

I think we covered this in a thread I initiated a while ago and from memory, the consensus was, there is not a lot that you can do.

Personally, I dont mind the odd hotlink as its a useful back-link sometimes. But if not monitored, it can become a bandwidth eater.

Hmm, Iwonder if people would be so keen to hotlink if it was an animated gif with the image rotated randomly to some choice text Smile

Posted: Mon Dec 12, 2005 8:17 am

Well guardian,sure it makes a difference if we talk about a 1 kb image or the one they linked from my forum ....that was 103kb.
Question is...and is btw same related issue to using sentinel.... Smile

Its the same situation,if you set it to no proxies allowed..you get the same result.
You cannot visit the website if your running on proxy.
The use of RewriteRule \.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ - [F] works infact the same.
When your using a proxy you cannot see the images used on the site ...
so i know some sites that use the no proxy allowed,and is could be needed if you realy wanna ban someone...

but in this case you visit a website and you dont see any images,just the famous big red X.
Other thing is,if you dont use any htaccess rule you have to check you referers all the time to see if any weird things are going on..

And yes i had my fun with the hotlinkers...
cause the linked image didnt had any width or height i created an image of 800 x 800 with gay content..but they didnt noticed that cause my linked image was on a topic page they didnt read anymore...
so i maild the websmaster....saying ...you eh like ..gay ?
Image was gone 10 minutes later...ha..ha

Posted: Mon Dec 12, 2005 11:15 am

you could write a watermarker.
Instead of redirecting the bad referer to a different image redirect them to watermarker.php or something.

Like: watermarker.php?img=$1 where $1 is path to image.

The php script loads the file from disk and modifies it using GD.
It does eat resources so it's best to cache the files.

Code:

<?php


$file = $_GET['img'];


$file_md5 = md5($file);


if (!file_exists("img_cache/$file_md5")) {


    // load the image and process the watermark


    $img = ImageCreateFromJPEG("img_cache/$file_md5");


    ImageString($img, $fontsize, $left+2, 3, $code, $txt_color);


    // now write the image


    touch("img_cache/$file_md5");


    imgjpeg($img, "img_cache/$file_md5");


}


passthru("img_cache/$file_md5");

Posted: Mon Dec 12, 2005 11:56 am

thanks djmaze,indeed a nice solution..
I think people would be very suprised if they would use a 404error page with automatic email notice...,and that could be used in different ways also...thats how i found out.,..