An Out Of The Ordinary Hotlinking Question - Stopping Hotlinking From OTHER websites?

[rokked]

I've been scouring the net for this, and thus far have found nothing.

We're having a problem at our forums with members continually hotlinking to our forums from other websites. This is the opposite problem most people are worried about, but it's gotten us into legal trouble in the past, and though most of our members abide by the rules, some of them are still hotlinking from sites rather than uploading at an image host.

Is there any kind of hack, or plugin, or even code that can disable hotlinking FROM other websites? Obviously you can ban it altogether, but what we're looking for is a way to disable it from CERTAIN sites. For example, hotlinking from photobucket, imageshack, etc. (hosts that are meant for hotlinking) would be permissable, but hotlinking from non-approved sites would automatically fail. Is this possible in VB, or are we just going to have to turn up the hotlinking watch to 24/7?

I appreciate anyone who can help. Our site owner is threatening to shut us down if we can't fix this problem.

[SCRIPT3R]

.htaccess

[rokked]

I thought .htaccess was meant to stop your own images from being hotlinked?

I'm trying to stop our own members from hotlinking within threads and forums on OUR website with images from OTHER websites.

[rokked]

For instance:

I was thinking maybe even something could be done with a simple word filter. Like, anything contained within an tag would somehow be scoured, and if in between the tags the words "imageshack", "photobucket", "geekfag", etc were not contained anywhere, they url would just get wordfiltered into **************. That way, you could write-up a safe list of hosting sites, and manually add them to the code when needed.

Is something like that even possible? Or is there any more information on complex wordfilters? I think it would be all we'd need to do.

[delmarva]

Running into the same problem here. Having hot linked images TO our forum is an issue because these images may be deleted on other servers and render the threads useless without the picture. Any help would be appreciated.

Not to mention legal issues as stated above...

[Marco van Herwaarden]

If i understand you correctly: Link Anonymizer and Censor

[rokked]

That's like 90% of the way there, thanks a ton.

However, is there any way to get that to only look at urls with [IMG] tags?

[Marco van Herwaarden]

Not sure, and sorry no time right now to look at that.