UBB.Developers Forums UBB.threads 7 Development How Do I? Hot Linking

More and more bandwidth issues slap me in the face every month. In analyzing my band width usage I discovered there was hot linking to my forum. I have a gallery of about 1000 pictures in my forums and. access is restricted to members only but the pictures do get hot linked by some. Finding these out on the Internet is a time consuming process so I decided to use .htaccess to prevent hot linking..

Here is a readily available Java script I am thinking about using.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?mydomain.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg)$ {http://www.mydomain.com/nasty.gif} [R,L]

Do you see any potential problems with creating a new .htaccess file using this script and placing it in my ubbt directory? I am sure some of you have faced and resolved the hot linking issue on your site and if you know of another way I would appreciate your sharing.

Those are Apache (web server) directives, not Javascript.

I use a similar one:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?example.com/ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif|gz|jpg|png|zip)$ - [NC,F]

I have this in my top level web document directory.

[]Those are Apache (web server) directives, not Javascript.

I use a similar one:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?example.com/ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif|gz|jpg|png|zip)$ - [NC,F]

I have this in my top level web document directory.
[/]

hey thats a good idea so I just add my domain .
then add them lines to my .htaccess ??

Yes replace example with your site

I added it to mine and it works great.

hehe i got a 500 error woops guess mod rewrite is not enabled eh? LOL

Is it your server or a company? If you yours simply write support and have them enable it. Most do have it enabled.

And if you are running IIS on a windows machine you can use the LeechBlocker dll which will disallow any bandwidth stealing. Attached is a zip file.

Warm regards

Nikos