Hotlinking
 

Hi all,
I was just wondering if anyone can suggest a way to monitor for hotlinking of images on a website I run. I've used various hotlinking protections in the past which seemed to result in a reduction in bandwidth usage but had the unwanted effect of preventing a lot of visitors from viewing the site due to firewall issues.

Is there a way I can check this out in CPanel?

Cheers if you can offer suggestions,

Al

Re: Hotlinking
 

Sorry I'm not more techie, can't help you there but what if dissable right clicking / context on your site, this should work as well, shouldn't it ? I've seen this on many sites but again must appologise for being a :dunce:

Re: Hotlinking
 

There is hotlink protection with your version of cpanel when this is turned on it will in theory prevent people linking your pics on other sites with no firewall restrictions taking place so the visitors should still be able to view your site.

Re: Hotlinking
 

The CPanel hotlinking protection is what I used before and found that quite a few people could not view any of the graphical content. Some people found they had to reconfigure firewall settings, whilst others couldn't manage it at all.

Re: Hotlinking
 

There are a few scripts here that might suit your needs http://www.hotscripts.com/search/9801431.html
Other methods to reduce BW would be to optimize your images to reduce the the size of the images

Re: Hotlinking
 

or put your pics on sites like Flickr ;)

In my experience the gallery scripts available in CPanel are a bit hard to use, I tried Coppermine, for example ....

Re: Hotlinking
 

I presume this is a *nix box running Apache and not an NT box with IIS. Have you got shell access? Have you thought about playing around with .htaccess? This is a nice 'n' easy way to prevent hotlinking.

Re: Hotlinking
 

If you can use .htaccess files, create one with the code in it below, substitute domain.com with your domain.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?domain.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg)$ - [F]


Place a copy in each folder where your images are placed.

Here is a good place where you can create different .htaccess files.

http://www.htaccesstools.com/