I happened to check my referral logs on my server this morning for the first time in a long time. (I usually just look at the SiteMeter at the bottom of my pages.) I was unpleasantly surprised to see a ton of entries showing various images of mine being snagged by other sites. The perpetrators were people on BlackPlanet, MiGente, and various discussion forums. After doing some quick Googling I found out how to modify my .htaccess file to prevent people from stealing my bandwidth in this way. I actually went one step further and replaced the jacked images with the following:
That should give those people a nice little surprise when they check their sites. 🙂 (You can see this in action here, here, here and here )
Here are some resources if you wish to do something similar to protect your bandwidth:
- Test your hotlink protection
- Preventing hot linking of images
- A slightly different method of preventing hotlinking
I almost feel bad about doing this, only because they were stealing pictures of Black Star’s album cover (that one is really popular on the forums) and the Boondocks. I can’t front on their taste, but they need to learn proper web decorum.
Good for you Mike. Nice Move!!!!!
the size of the replacement image is a whopping 7.7 kb. that will chew up bandwidth if you have a lot of bandwidth stealers. reduce the size of the image by converting the image into a .png or lessen the quality of the image.
That is hilarious!!
You could probably save it as a 2-color GIF to cut down the file size.
good point Charles & Rusty. No sense in wasting more bandwidth than I have to on this.
You’re an amazing dude Bruh Mike. If only were as half as technical as you, I could get my Wi-Fi network up and running again so I can post more often on my site.