Bandwidth Thieves
 

Looking on my stats during the last day, I found that many people had linked my forum icons and images on other sites/board, due to the high costs of bandwidth I decide to look around to find a way to stop them !!!
I found this Great Script by Christopher Heng and I use it for protect my icons, then I integrated this code in the attachment.php of VB.
In this way anyone that link directly my images receive an error :)
Look at the modify on my file.

Upped last good attachment.php :)

Thanks.But how to use this script?

To protect icons and smiles you must use chimage script by Christopher Heng, configure the good hosts and the path to images directory, e-mail address and your host homepage.
Then copy the script in your forum directory and modify the smiles and icons path like the example image here attached.
To protect your attached images, you only have to configure the first line of the attachment.php with your good host list and your e-mail address.

]nice one... I'll install it today :) Thanx

not to be a bother but i don't believe you're allowed to distribute entire vBulletin files

nicksaunders is correct, you may not post full files from vBulletin. I removed the attachment from your post. You need to make this hack in a text file with instructions on how to install it.

Wouldn't it be easier to add a .htaccess file inside your images directory that will allow only your site to pull stuff from it. So lets say you have that file in there and inside images directory you have happy.jpg. if you wish you could specify a different link when they request that. so when they add www.domain.com/images/happy.jpg it would send them www.domain.com/images/stolen.jpg and on that picture you can add anything such as "Stolen from DomainForums". I think this might be easier then changing the html of every smilie.

I agree with MrLister. This is what I do and I no longer have the problems I once did. Plus my hits from those sites are up. People are curious when they see the little red x and they come to see the site.

If anyone wants the htaccess file, send me a pm.

Chris

I tried the .htaccess method. It stops people from downloading images to other sites, but sometimes it fails to deliver content to visitors of my site as well, usually those behind a proxy server.

Any fix for that?