Hotlinking :: Preventing?

[ClubMed]

How can I find out if someone is hotlinking to my site?
And is there a way to prevent this?

Thanks.

[ClubMed]

^Bump

[Beemer]

From what I found you can prevent this at the server. Check with your hosting service to see what tools they are equipped with.

Here's the Yahoo search results for, "prevent hotlinking".

Cheers!

[vass0922]

You can check your web logs to see where requests are coming from. If anythign you can get something like webtrends to see if individual images are being requested from a specific IP. (the location of those logs depends on your webserver, and your OS)

This is from an apache log (its ugly )
(ViewersIP) 100.200.100.200 - - [05/Jan/2003:05:59:32 -0500] "GET /subdirectory/copyrightimage.jpg HTTP/1.1" 200 126789 "http://domainfilewascalledby/subdirectory/callingfile.html" "Opera/7.0 (Windows 2000; U) [en]"

[Whir]

I think there may be a way to do it with a scripting language. One of my friends has pretty much everything on his site hidden from direct links. He uses PHP.

[jkrohn]

Well if you are looking to prevent hotlinking to pages, then you could do it with any scripting language in the page (Javascript, asp, PHP, Perl, etc.).

As far as hotlinking images and/or other files (non source files be they of HTML or scripted) then you will have to use a server setting, as no language can be used like that to run when something is hotlinked.

A server setting could eaisly be setup to do that though IMO.

Jkroh

[iNeb]

Use .htaccess to prevent it

[Beemer]

And here is a link that will help you out with .htaccess . http://www.javascriptkit.com/howto/htaccess.shtml

Cheers!

[ClubMed]

Excellent! Thanks very much for the info, I am using PHP, and will edit .htaccess once I get home.

Thanks again

[ClubMed]

Testing the function:







Working