An end to those livejournal hotlinkers

[bio]

Once again, I spent the morning going through the stats of my sites and crying over the amount of bandwidth I lose to hotlinkers from myspace, livejournal, opendirviewer, and blogspot.

Renaming the images and then editing my blog entires to reflect the changes was an incredible pain in the butt. So, I did a google on it.

I added the following code into my .htaccess file

Code: Select all

# Begin  hotlink image replacement
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?opendirviewer\.com/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?myspace\.com/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?blogspot\.com/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?livejournal\.com/ [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ images/no_hotlink.gif [L]
# End hotlink image replacement

In a nutshell, the server now looks at the requesting URL and if it finds that the image was requsted by a page at any of the above domains, it replaces it with a very small gif file (about 7k).

Sure... I could have just told it to not serve up anything, but I'm trying to educate while wacking them with a stick.

Feel free to steal the above code and place it in your own .htaccess file (unless, of course, you have a site onj one of those domains and hotlink back to your own..... then it'll screw you over).

Oh.... you will have to have an replacement image in /images/ called no_hotlink.gif to make it work.

Oh... and here's the image I offer up in replacement to the one they hotlinked to.

Enjoy!

[jc]

You are my god.

[bio]

j00 want for I to edit your .htaccess file?

[jc]

Yes please.

[bio]

done

[jc]

Thank you. Not that I really think many people were hotlinking my crap...

[bio]

It looks like you have a file being linked to from groovygamers.com.

I checked your logs

[jc]

Yep, that's me.

I'm a DnD dork remember. Groovygamers.com is a forum for dorks like me.