Gundam Image Leechers
been checking on whats taking up most of my bandwidth lately, and found out that a bulk of what registered as referrals were merely myspace leechers hotlinking directly to my images. unfortunately they were not even giving any credit much less providing a link back to this site. Normally I wouldn’t mind people using my images and hosting them on their own blog or imagehosting sites. in fact I feel flattered that they find my images worthwhile enough to plug into their site. however I do wish that they acknowledge the image’s creator. furthermore leeching or hotlinking eat up bandwidth. In the end, it bogs down the site where the image is hosted and the site owner would end up footing the hosting bill.
So how should one deal with these leechers? I say make them pay the piper. how? advertise your blog on their page. ^^ you can change the image on your blog or do a apache rewrite to redirect all image hotlinks from a domain to a specific image advertising your site. *sweet revenge*
Edit .htaccess and edit and add the following
RewriteEngine on
# Attempt to stop hot linking from these specific sites
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^(.+\.)?friendster.com/ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^(.+\.)?myspace.com/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/path/to/your/stop.png
RewriteRule .*\.(gif|jpg|png|avi)$ http://yoursite.com/path/to/your/stop.png
code from surprise highway , image from hetemeel.com
