.htaccess hotlinking stuff

Wednesday Mar 8th 2006

I found that my .htaccess file wasn’t blocking hotlinkers like it should have been so I had to do a rewrite of it. I found a nice tutorial that helped me out quite a bit, so everything is to my satisfaction now concerning that.

Definition of “hotlink” for those who don’t know: This is when someone will directly link to an image (or other file) on your web site from their web site, effectively hogging your bandwidth. That’s bad. MySpace users are infamous for this. Since they can’t physically host any files, they link to others without any thought that they are stealing bandwidth (literally) by doing so. Hotlinking does not mean to block people from viewing images. It means that they can only view the images on your site and not someone else’s by means of direct linking.

After the .htaccess fix I discovered some 403 errors in my server log. 403 means “forbidden” by the way. So I checked it out. Someone on a message board (most likely) was hotlinking the images from my Buick post.

To the guy who did that: Stop your fucking hotlinking and just link to the article instead, ok? Good. Glad we had that chat.