I took a random stroll through my referrers the other day as I'm prone to do out of curiosity from time to time. I found a website that had came out of nowhere to become one of my largest referrers which really peaked my interest. Upon review their blog, they had dozens of pictures from my site in the blog, each one of them hotlinked from my site. Rather than waste my time emailing someone in the Czech Republic, I merely decided if I can't beat 'em, exploit them. I decided to alter the photo that was being displayed at the top of their page for a little free advertising. My site visitors to the Olsens subdomain of mysite has nearly doubled since
That's actually part of the conundrum for me, Shannon. With that level of effective free advertising, I'm sure that it's really bothering me. As long as I can continue to find them, I will continue to exploit their thievery to my benefit. MySpace members are infamous for this too ... everytime I find one through backlink checks, etc. I usually send an email giving them the choice to host the image elsewhere, place a link on their page giving credit back to the site from which they're stealing bandwidth (me), or give me an address to send a hosting bill to. Of course, by the time they get the email, I've already changed the photo to something similar to the one above.
My server has some kind of feature I read about the other day that prevents that kind of hotlinking...
did you alter the image, or is it altered on the server side before its served to an external domain? the latter, i'd love to see and would implement!
lol i'd love if a person stole a pic of a hot girl from my site and i replaced it with a big hard-on or something lol!
I don't have cpanel on my host, and I'm honestly not savvy enough to do any comprehensive htaccess or other scripting; I merely altered the photo, maintained the file name and reloaded it the to server to affect it www-wide.
In general I just disable hotlinking. Makes it much easier especially if you have loads of images people want to get their hands on. Those MySpace users are the main culprits.
I've been giving the little bastards at that place Crusader listed (won't push their site name more than needed) some little surprises. A hotlinked image of Lindsay Lohan might now result in any one of the following images on their profile pages, with more to come ...
I have about 200.000 hits a month to the picture that is being shown when people try to hotlink images from zindy.zone.dk (just a simple one that says no hotlinking - visit this url instead). That is quite a lot of free advertising
You're wasting your time with those kind of images wrmineo. They're too cool and kinda nice. What you really want to do is give them something disgusting that gets their accounts reported if you are p***'d off, or just continue the free advertising. You could always get creative in Photoshop.