Hotlinking

[grynmoors]

OK, this topic has been beat to death, but I had a thought and don't know if my idea is even possible but thought I'd throw it out there.

Is there a way that if someone is hotlinking something from your site, that the thing being hotlinked forces the theif's page to redirect to yours the instant the hotlinked thing is displayed in a browser? How fun would that be (or maybe it's a bad idea if it's used in a malicious way which someone is bound to figure out I'm sure)?

This would probably require some kind of script I would imagine....like if referrer isn't same domain then image redirect is yourdomain.com. I googled it but couldn't find anything except about .htaccess and bandwidth theft, which we already know about...I wanted to take it one step further.

Here's what sparked my idea...I had an incorrect URL to one of the images on one of my sites but didn't know it. I had the .htaccess set to direct the normal 404 error document to the index page of my site (which is way better than people getting the dreaded 404 error message especially if they came there from an outdated or broken link).

Each time I visited the page with the misspelled link to the image I was trying to display, it kept taking me to the index page of my site rather than display the page I wanted and have it show the normal broken image thingie, which is when I realized that something on the page was forcing a 404 error and taking me to the main page. Turned out to be a misspelled image url. I found it rather interesting that something as simple as a misspelled url to an image would force the redirect. Then I thought...what a great idea to be able to do this with hotlinking. Talk about screwing with bandwidth thieves!

[grynmoors]

Well, here's something I eventually found which sounds promising, I'm going to give it a try. I'm not sure how this would work with vShare since I'm mainly concerned with other types of web sites that I have (regular sites not run by vShare). If I can get this to work with a regular web site, I'll see if it works with vShare or how to get it to work with vShare (if possible).

What I think this does, if I am understanding it correctly, is that when you go to the hotlinkers site, your stolen image will appear as the web page that the hotlinked image appears on unless a person has already been to your site, in which case the hotlinked image will appear...and the hotlinker will have no clue that you've done this since the image will have been in their cache.

http://www.safalra.com/programming/php/ ... otlinking/

[queervision.net]

Why don't you try using the hot linking in cPanel? Every cPanel has hotlink protection, try it, it works for me! :-)

[grynmoors]

Because anytime I've ever done anything in cPanel, and it doesn't matter what host it's been, it affects every website that I own on the server (I have a bunch of addon domains) and I don't want that. I often use avatars and sigbanners on a lot of forums that I'm on. It's way easier for me to put the hotlink protection in the .htaccess of the sites I want to protect.

[RAMMSTEIN]

You cannot do nothing with hotlinking, At my site i don't allow embed code, To avoid hotlinking i change my videos folder name every month :lol: . And at my old folder i put a .htaccess file with full protection. With this the other site that has hotlinked my videos will show my site logo, :lol:

[grynmoors]

Yes, that's exactely what I do also as well as have my logo appear instead of the hotlinked video and/or images from my sites, but my post was about what if we could have the stolen image redirect to our website when the image was called on the hotlinking site.