I have Webalizer and AWstats available to me as part of my hosting plan. My question is, what am I looking for to tell if someone is hotlinking a file (say, a picture?) Webalizer shows almost nothing - just hit counts. AWstats shows me sites that link to me (under Referring Sites), but it doesn't say what page (or file) they're linking to. It also shows which pages (or files) are being loaded (under Pages-URL right below File Types), but not where they're being linked from. My major issue right now is I have a ton of those pages that scrape the most recent images uploaded to LiveJournal, in my referring sites, but I don't see any of my images on the page. (I assume whatever image has scrolled off.) I would like to know what image someone from LJ has linked to.
There is an article here (written by someone on these forums I think) which shows how to use the "extras section" functionality in AWStats to create a specific section for people hotlinking to your images. It requires editing your site's awstats configuration file which you might not have access to depending on your host, but you could also ask your host to add it for you.
Thank you! I have added it, but it shows nothing right now - will this only take effect with future hotlinked files? (I did add the gif and jpg file types.)
It should start to show data the next time your stats update and process new entries in your log file.
I copypasted the code exactly and I replaced her URL with my own, correctly placing the backslashes and dots. Any ideas why it still thinks my own site is hotlinking files?
Did you make sure to use \. in replace of the . in your domain? Also if I remember correctly the line with your URL should be on the same line as the "ExtraSectionFirstColumnValues1=" statement. I think it might have wrapped in the example shown.
Hi Kat2 and tflight, If the problem is still there, please copy here the complete line you use in place of ExtraSectionFirstColumnValues1="REFERER,^(?!http:\/\/www\.internetofficer\.com)http:\/\/(.*)$" Code (markup): Jean-Luc (InternetOfficer.com)
Here it is (and it is all on the same line): ExtraSectionFirstColumnValues1="REFERER,^(?!http:\/\/www\.sierraplanet\.com)http:\/\/(.*)$" Code (markup): Here are a couple of the examples of the "sites" it says are hotlinking (my site is Sierraplanet.com) sierraplanet.com/bookstore/books3.html sierraplanet.com/games.html I set the default value from 25 to 50... I am afraid that if I keep upping that, it will end up displaying every page on my site!
I'm not positive, but I would suspect the issue is the www and non-www versions of your site. http://sierraplanet would look like a hotlinking site since it doesn't match http://www.sierraplanet in the code.
tflight is right. I would try this : ExtraSectionFirstColumnValues1="REFERER,^(?!http:\/\/(www\.)?sierraplanet\.com)http:\/\/(.*)$" Code (markup): To avoid that "hotlinks" from pages in Google cache come in the list, I use this other version : ExtraSectionFirstColumnValues1="REFERER,^(?!http:\/\/www\.internetofficer\.com|http:\/\/64\.233\.|http:\/\/66\.102\.|http:\/\/66\.249\.|http:\/\/72\.14\.)http:\/\/(.*)$" Code (markup): Jean-Luc
That doesn't seem to have fixed it, but I used my stats page's manual update... I'll wait till the server runs the update tonight (I think at midnight) to see what happens.
Keep in mind Kat that updating the stats will not erase previous entries in that section... it will just look for new data and add it to the old data.
You can (carefully) edit the data file where your statistics are stored provided you have access to that file from your host. Your configuration file should tell you the location of the file and you will want to search it for the "extra" section. Make a backup of the data file before making any edits in case it doesn't go as planned.