Please Help Me With Hotlink Protection

[FlyingJenny]

Okay, I have searched the forums and I still can't find a solution that is dumbed down enough for me to understand, so please bear with me. I am having TONS of my bandwidth eaten up mainly from MYSpace-ers using my pictures with IMG tags. I have tried using the Hotlink protection in CPanel but even though I whitelist all of my sites and feeds, some users still report that my site appears screwed up and unformatted to them, as in they can view the text on the page but my entire template disappears when they view my page. There are other such errors like that that I can see as well when using hotlink protection. I really don't want to block hotlinking from everywhere- I would much rather if there was a blacklist function than a whitelist function as that would be infinitely more useful to me. Any suggestions of how I can block only MySpace or other domains that are abusing my bandwidth? And can you tell me how to do so exactly? I have never edited an .htaccess file, so I don't know how to do that. Sorry for being so clueless.

[GvilleRick]

I ran a Google search for 'hotlink protection htaccess' and found a number of pages with sample code to put into your .htaccess file. The page found at this link specifically mentioned ways to block MySpace, Live Journal, and similar sites only.

 

I would suggest backing up your .htaccess file before making any changes. A mistake in the file can cause the whole site to be inaccessible.

[FlyingJenny]

I would suggest backing up your .htaccess file before making any changes. A mistake in the file can cause the whole site to be inaccessible.

 

That is what Ii am afraid of- I am pretty good at screwing things like that up. But thanks for the links- I will check them out. I am not even really sure where to find my .htaccess file to be honest.

Edited April 22, 2007 by FlyingJenny

[TCH-Thomas]

Welcome to the forum, FlyingJenny.

 

The .htaccess file should be in your public_html folder. If it is not, you will need to create it.

 

To do this, open notepad, enter the info, save as .htaccess and upload it to public_html. If the file gets named htaccess.txt or similar you will need to rename it to the above in bold, before it can be used by the server.

[TCH-Andy]

Welcome to the forum, FlyingJenny

[TCH-Don]

Welcome to the forum, FlyingJenny

let us know if you get it figured out

or need more help.

[TCH-Bruce]

Welcome to the forum, FlyingJenny

[FlyingJenny]

Thanks for the welcome everyone. I kind of gave up on the .htaccess file thing and used the Hotlink Protection on CPanel. I tried to list all of the addresses that I could think of to whitelist. Does anyone know, if I want to whitelist www.blankeyblank.com and anything under it, can I just add an asterisk or some other wildcard to the end of the address so that any page under that domain will be whitelisted as well?

[TCH-Bruce]

If you whitelist blankeyblank.com it will whitelist the entire domain.