Protecting graphics

[JonUrban]

Is there anyway to prevent anyone from linking a graphic from your site to another site?

I have an animated gif file that was customized for my board. However, some people that liked it have linked it into their signature at other boards around the web, but instead of just copying the image to their own server, they have just linked it to it's location on my server.

When I look at my webstats, at the "last 300 visitors", most of these "visits" are calls to the graphic from these other forums. Since the poster that is using the graphic posts a lot and at a lot of different forums, I am getting hundreds of hits per hour as people in those forums view his posts.

I am afraid that I already know that answer (no), but I figured I'd ask you folks if there was any way to keep that graphic "in the local board only".

Thanks

:-jon

[filburt1]

Yes, search for "hotlink protection." However, that won't stop them from saving the image themselves and then copying it. You can even make it such that when the image is hotlinked, a different image is displayed to the thief (usually one that says something like "This image was stolen from mysite.com").

[Xenon]

there is a way to htaccess protect your graphics.

do a search, it has been posted a few time iirc

[AndreaBash]

heh heh. I'm really cruel.. but I'd just keep moving the graphic until he got the picture. That would be really fun.

[JonUrban]

Help!

Here is my .htaccess file:


deny from 192.132.24.81

# Rewrite Rule for images
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.quadraphonicquad.com.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.quadraphonicquad.com.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(gif|GIF|jpg|JPG)$ - [F]





However, the graphics are still showing up on the other forums. Is there something else I have to do?

HELP!! (I am not too good at this)

THANKS

:-jon

[SmEdD]

lol I love making it link a nasty picture so there like WTF and get all confused.

[MaDCaT75]

Today at 06:20 AM SmEdD said this in Post #6
lol I love making it link a nasty picture so there like WTF and get all confused.

haha.... how do you do that? I dont know much about doing that kinda thing please tell me :cheeky:

[SmEdD]

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

[MaDCaT75]

What file is that done in? Sorry for being such a n00b

[Chris M]

You have to create a htaccess file

The easiest way is to copy that into Notepad ([high]making sure you edit the domain to your domain[/high]), and save it as htaccess and as a .txt file... Then upload the htaccess.txt file to your graphics directory, and rename the file on your server to [high].htaccess[/high]



Satan