April 15, 2004
Direct Linking, It Sucks
Rant time. Every month I have to deal with the problem of
direct linking, or hotlinking, of images. Most of the time this involves mouth-breathing idiots on message boards who want a cute picture for their avatar, but are too ignorant or lazy to upload something to their
own server. Stupid people. Although the images in question aren't copyrighted as my own - and I'd have no problem if they used them the
correct way - it's still a big pain in the butt.
Memo to webmasters: once an offending hotlinked image is identified, have a little fun by doing the old switcheroo. Recently, a somebody on LiveJournal direct-linked a scrubbles.net image in a weblog post. Naturally, that post ended up on all of her LJ friends' lists. So I replaced it with this.
Posted by mhinrichs at April 15, 2004 12:17 AM
This problem also got out of control for me recently, but I was able to fix it quite quickly with some lines in an .htaccess file (this will work for any Apache web server) that prevent access to images by any server that is not one that I specify. Since I believe we share the same web host, I can easily write you a comparable script for your site; drop me a line!
Isn't it annoying? The worst is when someone does it for their message board icon and it gets viewed a zillion times. But the .htaccess fix works, I highly second the notion. And you can double check it here: http://altlab.com/hotlinking.html
My solution was similar to your own. What someone wanted to get was this:
http://www.coldfusionvideo.com/f/fighter-e-good.jpg
What they got was this:
http://www.coldfusionvideo.com/f/fighter-e.jpg
Yeah, this got out of hand for us at capnwacky.com. Now, we send folks to http://www.capnwacky.com/no_link.jpg
Someone ended up starting a livejournal just because they were very, very angry about it.
I've always preferred using a picture of a penis, or some other such "offensive" thing.
Amen! Our site has been inundated with hotlinking knuckleheads - mostly from LiveJournal. Most of the images they hotlinked were from the NYC Pride parade we have on our site. 99% of the time, they attach some kind of homophobic text to the image. My remedy is to replace the image with a "questionable" image, most of the time that means of um, large, naked women.
It works everytime.
Oh, how I wish someone would hot-link some images from me, now... ! I've got so many ideas for embarrassing things.
Yeah, same problem here. Those darn lj kids! I replaced the image they were linking to (a converse high heel shoe!) with a pic of my kid's naked butt. I felt a little badly afterwards, tho. The culprits were just kids, but I guess they need to learn somehow.
