What do you do with "hotlinkers"?

dalecosp

Yesterday I found a foreign website had stuck an old graphic that's still in our images directory into their sitewide header.

I can't figure the attraction at all ... the graphic was a demonstration graphic of a certain size banner ad ... black/white with a little text in it, but over 700px wide.

It really threw out stats out of kilter ... which is how I discovered it.

So, today I'm changing .htaccess every 60 seconds. I'm either giving them a 403, or redirecting their hotlink to "share the love". I have a couple of "please don't hotlink" images hosted elsewhere, and one graphic of a guy getting pwned by a tank.

Do you think they'll catch on? whois returned a private registration. :glare:

Should I not be doing this?

What do you do to 'hotlinkers'?

Derokorian

I don't do anything except put a watermark on images being linked to from other sites.

Weedpacket

dalecosp wrote:
Should I not be doing this?

It's your server - you can serve (within reason) what you like from it, no?

If I understand your description, removing the image or changing it has no effect on any of your site's "legitimate" traffic...

dalecosp

Weedpacket: we're in the "ad business", and the CEO is like 75 years old and would be a candidate for a PHB award if he was no good at knowing our niche ... which he does, inside and out. So we really need to have the stats are realistic as possible as he sits and stares at them for a good long while every morning and thinks PHB thoughts (which is "the future of the company").

Brad: don't check the referer header? Why is that? Here's what I'm doing:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?hotlinkingsite\.com/ [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ - [F]
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ http://somebigphotothatcovershalftheirpage.png [NC,R,L]
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ http://anotherPNGthattalksabouthotlinking.png [NC,R,L]

The script alternates the rules periodically.

dalecosp

Day 3 (or more), and still they've not changed it.

Is it vacation time on the Continent?

dalecosp

Caught someone else today, heh heh. See oreojung.tv - and look for 'PWNED' ...

Ashley_Sheridan

I'd probably do something a bit worse than what you've done. You've got plenty of scope while still remaining legal in what you're serving up. Something along the line of that Oatmeal comic with some badly drawn person romancing a bear, with a suitable label indicating it's the site owner. Technically, as they're using your graphic, it's not like you "knew" that it would be seen on their site... :p

dalecosp

Ashley Sheridan;11012687 wrote:
I'd probably do something a bit worse than what you've done. You've got plenty of scope while still remaining legal in what you're serving up. Something along the line of that Oatmeal comic with some badly drawn person romancing a bear, with a suitable label indicating it's the site owner. Technically, as they're using your graphic, it's not like you "knew" that it would be seen on their site... :p

Well, I might. I figured out why the .htaccess rule wasn't working ... typo, actually (tech support at the host company caught it). Apparently my brain's not completely back from last week's vacation.

The site's CSS apparently doesn't allow that container to overflow (z-index? I've not looked). I tried putting a large photo there, but you could only see part of it. When the site that originated this thread linked us, we did manage to cover up about 33% of their homepage.... :evilgrin:

I have considered serving the images with PHP, perhaps including a little JS redirect, or something. THAT should certainly get someone's attention. But I'm really so behind in Real Work(tm) that I'm not sure I want to devote any more time to something that really isn't going to help our bottom line. If it continues long enough, I suppose I'll give them some more "hotlink love" 😉

bradgrafelman

dalecosp;11012695 wrote:
I have considered serving the images with PHP, perhaps including a little JS redirect

How is it you expect to accomplish that last part? The browser is expecting a binary image when it requests the URL from your webserver, so I don't see how JS code could get executed...?

Bonesnap

dalecosp;11000117 wrote:
What do you do to 'hotlinkers'?

Tubgirl.

EDIT: If you're lucky and don't know what tubgirl is, then please, please do NOT Google it. You're better off not knowing. Forget about not safe for work, it's not safe for humanity. Which is why I'd use it in such a case as this. 🙂

johanafm

Is it possible to specify cache headers so that a browser never caches the requested image in conjunction with a 302 redirect with a querystring of ?t=time() to force the browser to request the target image of the redirect every time?

And in that case, obviously redirect to the largest image file you find on the hotlinking site's server...

dalecosp

johanafm;11013239 wrote:
Is it possible to specify cache headers so that a browser never caches the requested image in conjunction with a 302 redirect with a querystring of ?t=time() to force the browser to request the target image of the redirect every time?

And in that case, obviously redirect to the largest image file you find on the hotlinking site's server...

I like the way you think :evilgrin: --- I'll save that line of inquiry for next time, as the situation is now resolved after a week or so of my funning with them and there's now Real Work(tm) piling up in my cube... 🙂

Ashley_Sheridan

Don't do that, your server is still the one serving up that file, and that just adds to your monthly bandwidth needlessly!

dalecosp

Thanks, Ashley ... I'll try and keep that in mind. Although, I think we've bandwidth to burn.

Not to mention the gigabytes I've saved the company over the past several months by adding serve-by-gzip, JS/CSS caching, auto image compression with SLIR, etc. We actually had visits go up while bandwidth halved itself over the past few months...