Board Optimization - Complete Hotlink Protection

Title : Complete Hotlink Protection

Version : 1.1

Coder : naveeid
Purpose : Prevent your forum attachments from being directly linked to - prevent bandwidth abuse.

Why : My dedicated server was down due to too many hotlinked image connections. i was feeling helpless. even after protecting images through .htaccess, images were still hot linked through attachment.php



How : just edit your server .htaccess and modify the code with your domain names



Installation :
edit your .htaccess file.

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?yourfirstwebsite\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?yoursecondwebsite\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?google\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ http://www.yourfirstwebsite/anypic.jpg [L]


RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?yourfirstwebsite\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?google\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteRule .*attachment\.php*$ http://www.yourfirstwebsite/anypic.jpg [L,R,NC]

1) please change yourfirstwebsite.com and yoursecondwebsite.com to your websites on that cpanel account. if you dont have a second website then you can remove that line

2) i am allowing google to fetch images or attachments for their server. if you dont want to allow google then just remove that line.

3) replace anypic.jpg with your website banner or hotlink warning banner.

it works very fine. its the simplest and easiest available soloution.

Demo:-
i have installed it on my website , you can check my website for hotlink protection.
http://www.nidokidos.org/attachment....3&d=1302073196
now this image will show in my website , this image will be displayed if opened it in a browser. but if it will be opened in any other website , it will be replaced by my website banner.

[naveeid]

welcome madness85

[naveeid]

welcome angeljs

[naveeid]

i have no idea about VBSEO MonkYZ

[MikeSheen]

I was looking for something fairly targeted for hotlink redirection and didn't find anything posted here suitable, so I'm sharing my solution - it's not ideal - if there is an update to vbulletin I'll need to re-apply my changes, but for my purposes it worked.

I found an image hotlinked to my site from a cricket enthusiast site - the image was this:



It was some Indian cricket nut trying to diss the Aussies in a post about cricket after a win by India over Australia, so I specifically targeted referrers from that site to display this image instead:



How I ended up doing it was hacky, but it works... in attachment.php, I just added these lines of code:

if( stripos($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'], 'cricketweb.net') !== FALSE ) {
    header('Content-Type: image/jpeg');  
    readfile('images/numberone.jpg');
    exit;
}

Simple, silly and pointless, but I had fun

URL of the post hotlinking is here - but no doubt the poster will edit their post when they learn of my tricksies, so it may not last long.