lilirose

Excellent! Thanks very much, Andy!

Thank you so much for the response, Andy! Unfortunately, blocking the entire domain isn't a good option. The person causing the problem is doing so on a single entry he posted to a large journaling site. Since I'm also a member of the journaling site in question, I don't want to ban all incoming traffic from there- I want to be able to link to my TCH site from my profile on the journaling site, and I also want to allow the journaling site to pick up my TCH-hosted blog's RSS feed. So is there any way to block a single page on a domain without blocking the entire domain?

Someone is linking to one of the pages on my site with the specific intent of insulting me. Is it possible to block incoming traffic that came from the page where that link is posted? I know I can block IPs, but the visitors coming from that page are from all over the world, so IP banning won't help. Thanks in advance...

Bruce, again, I do appreciate the fact that you were trying to be helpful, and thank you for that. It seems obvious to me that I wouldn't have been able to tell you what image was being hotlinked to, since the question I asked was "How do I discover what image is being linked to?" Again, I thank you for your help, my frustration was (and still is) not with you, or with any of the people who were kindly trying to help me; rather I was frustrated that I'm not good at asking questions in a clear enough manner. As I said in my last post, I would have preferred not to simply block the hotlinker for the following reason, stated in my previous post: My apologies to anyone who I have offended due to my poor communications skills.

Jim, I have not had any success in figuring out why AwStats doesn't match my raw log, though it might have something to do with me clearing out the AwStats files before doing a backup a couple of weeks ago- though that doesn't seem right as I didn't remove my raw logs at that time. Andy, my apologies- now that I look back at my AwStats, I see that you are correct. I was matching the wrong line, which was a forum that I do participate in, so I thought I'd got more than 1000 hits from the chinese.cari.com link. My mistake. However, I am a bit curious how you accessed my stats without having my password? I didn't realize they were publicly accessible- or were you able to access it because you're a tech support person? I'm uncomfortable with the idea that anyone can view my stats at will- if there's a way to keep them private, please inform. abinidi, I don't think there's any need to scold me- you misinterpreted my intent. I was frustrated over the fact that I was apparently not communicating clearly, because nobody had given even a simple a "yes" or "no" answer to the question I asked twice. I do realise that the volunteers here were trying to help, but they were going to great lengths to give me information I hadn't asked for, so it seemed obvious to me that I wasn't making myself understood. Just for the record, I know that a lot of people who hotlink do so out of ignorance of copyright issues and the fact that bandwidth costs money, and thus my preferred solution would have been to discover which image was being hotlinked, so I could replace it with another image asking the hotlinker not to steal bandwidth. I thought it might have discouraged the hotlinker from doing the same thing to someone else in future. Maybe I should have said that in my OP but I was trying to be as succinct as possible so that I could get a clear answer to a clear question.

Andy, I'm not positive it's an image being hotlinked- it's just a hunch, because of repeated hits coming from a forum that I've never visited. The URL I'm getting from AwStats is ht_p://chinese.cari.com.my/myforum/viewthread.php . I can't find that URL or any portion of it in my raw access logs despite repeated searches. Oh well. I've turned Hotlink Protection on and will add the forums that I post photos to manually...I suppose it's better than letting strangers eat my bandwidth. Thanks for the help, all.

*sigh* I must be wording my question really badly or something, since the only one of you who even tried to answer my question ("How do I figure out which image they are hotlinking?") apparently didn't read the part of my OP where I said I'm not sure where AwStats is coming up with the URL if it's not in my raw access logs, though. It's quite a mystery.

I'm aware of the various ways to block the offending forum from accessing my site- that's not the question I'm asking. I want to know if there is a way to tell exactly which image is being hotlinked. Can anyone answer that question?

Yeah, I know it's possible to edit .htaccess in order to block that forum. Still, I want to know which image is being linked to. Is there no way to tell?

I was looking over my site's stats in AwStats recently and discovered that I had nearly a thousand hits from a Chinese forum. The link in AwStats was to a viewthread.php page, rather than showing me directly the exact thread or threads in that forum which sent all these visitors. I suspect an image from my site is being hotlinked by a user on this forum. What I'm trying to figure out is how to discover exactly which image is being hotlinked. AwStats does not tell me, and I've gone over my raw access logs searching for the relevant URL with no luck. The URL is not currently in my "Latest Visitor" logs, either. I have Hotlink Protection turned OFF and I wish to leave it that way, because both my husband and I often use images from my site on various forums that we participate in, and want to be able to do so without having to go into Cpanel and add the URL to Hotlink Protection's "allowed" list each time we do so. It's far easier for me to remove or rename images that are being illegally linked- it's only happened once before, and that time the image was in my "Latest Visitors" log. Is there a way for me to find out which of my images is being stolen without checking my "Latest Visitors" logs multiple times each day?

Thanks for that, Mark- deleting those AwStats files reduced the size of my backup tarball by 16 megabytes- that's a little puzzling in itself, since they were all text files and I thought .tar.gz was a compressed format? In any case, you've saved me at least an hour of downloading time, so I apprecate it!

I just discovered that the second biggest file I have in my site's home directory is tmp/awstats, at 16.15 megabytes. That seems really excessive to me. I'm wanting to create and download a backup but I want to clean out any unnecessary files first, because I'm on dial-up and it will take me hours to download the tarball. Will anything bad happen if I delete this huge AwStats file? I'm not really very interested in my stats at the moment anyway, because I've given up having a public blog and am only running a couple of small members-only forums.

I cannot say enough good things about SMF. I recommend it highly. It has features that even the more expensive paid boards do not. When I switched from phpBB to SMF, my bandwidth for that month dropped significantly (by over 50%) even though my forum was still doing the same amount of traffic. My forum had approx 250 users and we never had trouble with speed at any time. I gave up my forum a couple of weeks ago because the admin/moderating/forum drama thing was too much for me to deal with, but I still recommend SMF above all other software. Edited to fix typo

I've been with TCH for six months now, after having an extremely bad experience with my previous host. I am not what you would call an "easy-to-please" customer- I am only satisfied with the very best- yet I have never ceased to be impressed with the service I receive from TCH. My site has experienced no more than a few minutes' downtime total in the past six months, and both the TCH forums and help desk are staffed with the best tech support crew that I've run into anywhere in my ten years on the Net. Every time I've had a question or concern it's been dealt with very quickly, even on the one occasion that I had a problem at 5 AM on a Sunday morning- TCH were there for me. Recently I had a problem with my email, and TCH's tech support were always helpful and friendly, even when I was becoming extremely frustrated. I was also impressed with the fact that they continually respected my intelligence reather than talking down to me or giving "scripted" answers, as is unfortunately too common in the world of tech support. It turned out that the problem was on my end (originating with my ISP), but at every stage, TCH techs were polite, well-informed, and knowledgeable. I highly recommend TCH to anyone, at any level of experience, who is looking for the finest in web hosting.

Thanks for all the ideas for my 403 page, ya'll. The one Tommy sent is a gem...I think I'll have to do something similar.