Are there possibilities to detect users whome leaked info from your forum?
 

I'm thinking about ways to discover this, like for instance a personalized url that one (the admin/siteop) could trace back to the person having linked outside of the forum to begin with.

* For instance:

www.myforum.com/showthread.php?t=13 is normal
www.myforum.com/1ac5bfre44g55wd34.php?t=13 would, for example, be an url generated specifically for my account.

If I find this link somewhere where it shouldn't be, or an IP from outside the excisting userbase would use this link, I'd know where it comes from. Is this possible?

* Additionally, professional photo's will be posted on this forum, leaks isn't what I'm going to be happy with (the same will go for my userbase) out of commercial interests. I haven't been able to find a plugin that could do this. In essence a plugin that "stamps" the picture with hidden info.

My userbase won't excist out of IT-tech's so a little bit of security based on naivit? will suffice :)

English isn't my native language, I hope you will get what I am trying to say.

Possible? Yes, anything is possible, but it doesn't currently exist and would cost you quite a bit to get someone to create it. Then, even if you did have it created it would only work for logged in users unless you tie guest links to an ip address and even then ip addresses can't be tracked to a "single" user. I just don't see how this concept could work efficiently.


You best (and probably only) solution is to just watermark your photos. There is a reason it's been around forever and why it's still used today - it works and not much else does. Say someone takes your copyrighted (non-watermarked) photo and illegally posts it somewhere and the only way to tell its copyrighted is some hidden text in the file. Then 50 other people repost because it has no copyright marking / watermark etc. You would spend your entire life trying to track down who intentionally did it, who didn't, and in the end the best you'll probably even get out of it is to contact those that have reposted it and get them to remove it. Prosecuting anything like this is a real pain and would cost you more time and money than its worth.

Save yourself the headache, watermark your photos and be done with it. There are multiple mods on here that do this just search "watermark". Then if someone reposts your photos either consider it free advertisement or ask them to remove it.

The internet is a public forum in itself, if you really don't want someone copying something of yours don't post it. Inevitably it's going to happen and if you have a busy site it will happen often!