Hi, I had noticed that I was getting quite a bit of traffic from Stumbleupon. I found out about this from looking at my stats. So this traffic came to my site from users using stumbleupon. All is good and I had some good traffic, which converted. I now realise that hardly, if not any of the traffic is converting and the chances that it will is 0.000000000000000000000000000000000001% The reasons for this is because the traffic was coming to my free online games pages, and the stumbleupon visitors liked it, but recently I have now noticed that alot of the stumbleupon visitors are not actually including the games page, but are bookmarking the actually .swf file source, which is hotlinking and there is no chance that you can make money from this if you the stumble upon visitors only sees the actual game and not the page that the game should be listed on. So in other words, I an many others are paying for the bandwidth while stumbleupon is profiting from it and we gain nothing apart from lost bandwidth. This is costing quite abit. I have used hotlinking, but it doesn't work with IE. I would imagin that this would get stumbleupon into trouble soon as they are stealing my bandwidth, and even the bandwidth of sites like bbc.co.uk, etc. I know it is not really 100% stumbleupon's vault as it is user submited content, but it would be nice if stumbleupon could crack down on this kind of activity. So does anybody know a very good way to stop hotlinking of swf files. I can do with .access, but it doesn't seem to stop IE as it doesn't us the referrer when loading a .swf or .dcr file.
Why don't you add links to the SWF? Maybe some SWF/Javascript action to redirect to your pages if some JS isn't found on the page.
I also use stumbleupon for promoting my online arcade a bit. How can you tell when the users thumbs up the .swf instead of the page they're located on? I'm a bit concerned about this as well, but have never stumbled onto my own pages or games, so I don't know if it's happening to me. Thanks for any info, boxer126
If you're getting hits directly to your .swf file from StumbleUpon, then just rename your flash file and update the game page/script. Problem solved! I've found StumbleUpon to be far more valuable to me than any cost of bandwidth it's users have used.
Redirect from the swf to the proper page using htaccess. Stumblers are likely to link to your site so its not all about whether they click your ads.
Don't blame SU for your own inability to properly admin your system! Swf is just a document, just like any other file extension so calling it 'stealing' is stretching it a lot. Mad4 has got the solution (again) - a small tweak can rectify this self induced problem.
I was not blaming SU. I mentioned that it is not entirely SU's fault. I guess I may have been a little harsh, but I thought that I would get the message out just incase there are others who don't quite realise this. I hadn't previously thought about redirecting the swf url to the actual document. But even if I do that would that mean that when my page loads with the game on it, then wouldn't the game embedded in the page keep trying to redirect to the page that the game is on or would it only redirect if the actual url has a .swf extension. I like to mention again that I don't blame Stumbleupon and I also get some good traffic from it, but had noticed that a lot more of their users seem to be bookmarketing the actual .swf file rather than the page that the swf file is on. Also, I know it is my fault about not stopping the hotlinking properly, but I have been trying to figure out to do it for about 2 months now. I just couldn't get it to work with IE. I even asked in the sitepoint forums and devshed forums about 3 times and they just keep saying to use .htaccess like: But it doesn't work in IE because they don't use the referer when requesting the .swf or .dcr file. Also, I will try to redirect on the .swf file to my main page as this would be the best option if it works. I definately can't change the .swf file name and page that the games are on as this will just take up to much of my time. I would have to do this every 10 days or so as I have a popular site and it is just not 1 game that is being hotlinked. It is quite a few of them. Here are some links of examples of .swf files directly being linked to by some users: http://viqtor.stumbleupon.com/ http://merlinspike.stumbleupon.com/ http://rogueprince.stumbleupon.com/ http://ryter.stumbleupon.com/ After looking at some links, it doesn't seem as bad as what I first thought it was when I checked my stats last week. I guess that there is not much visitors linking directly to the .swf files after all. But even if there is a few, some of these pages are very popular and bandwidth on games can easily add up. Although, it may not look like it, I still definately want SU traffic and do like it. I was just telling others to watch this, but if you can prevent it then you can make some good money with SU and it also helps for your brand even if the traffic doesn't convert.
Use that IE shouldn't have any problem with the other one, or this one, but give it a try and let me know if it worked.
If you are on about IE not having a problem with the .htaccess script I mentioned above then yes it does and many people know this. IE is well behind compared to other browsers. I don't quite understand how your script would work above, it doesn't seem to mention what file extensions it will block. I don't want every file extension being blocked apart from .dcr and .swf. I need images to not be blocked as they get used in my tell a friend emails.