Leechers have small fingers
After taking a look at my server logs, I realized this site having a PageRank of 6/10, shows up early in Google Images. This means the images I embed in my writings, are a target for leechers.
This is a common phenomenon. People with free homepages and small webspace link big images from other peoples servers. That was OK with me as long it was only a few teenagers showing their liking of the BVB or KDE. Now people started to directly link 0.5MB images and producing more than 2000 links a day. That is a significant amount of traffic and very fast growing.
So I decided to install a hotlink prevention.
I use the solution presented by alistapart.com in the Smarter Image Hotlinking Prevention article by Thomas Scott.
This method, using mod_rewrite and a little PHP, prevents effectively the direct linking of images from unfriendly sites.
- You can link to the image (like, a text link) which will redirect to a little page showing the image and the origin.
- you can ask me to list you on the friendly sites list and load the image directly.
- Embedding the image from my site in your page will result in a broken image.
- You can download the image and save it on your server.
At the moment I use a whitelist. I have some friendly sites listed who can link my images. I am thinking about turning this around and making it a blacklist, only blocking unfriendly pages.
If you experience any problems or oddities please contact me.
Hope this is not causing too much trouble for friendly people.
30 October 2005 at 7:53
Thanks for contributing to breaking the internet!
30 October 2005 at 8:13
Breaking the internet?
I am a private person, paying for my bandwidth. I can only handle a limited amount of giving away my stuff for free.
As I said above, I did this to prevent people using a 700KB image to then scale it from 1600×1200 to 200×200. I have a small version of the image right where those people got the big one. Do the math, I am already getting 1GB a day, thats 30GB a month. Will you pay me for those 30GB? Just because people are too dumb to use the small images?
You want to use this on a regular page and ask me before using it? Fine, you are on the list.
You want to link to the image? Just link to it
You want to embed the image in your homepage without giving credit where you got it and whose money you are blowing out. Forget it
I can not see where this is breaking the internet. Taking without giving credit. Pretending to have done something using other peoples work. Thats breaking the internet.