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Image Hotlink


boxturt

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I have a whole group of sites (forums, sort of) linking to one of my images

 

www.leon.go-gaia.com/forum/ OR www.jim.go-gaia.com/forum/ or whatever.

 

Anyway - they all link to the same image and it shows up repeatedly on each and every page of theirs. This is hundreds of times daily.

 

Any reason I can't just redirect their request for my image back to them and one of their own images?

 

I tried it, it does work (used the biggest graphic of theirs I could find) but does that screw with things at this end?

 

It never occurred to me to do that before and I've never seen it mentioned, so I am curious.

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Sure, a redirect would work. Obviously you would want to change all your own references to that image first.

 

You could also create a 'special' image just for them. I know of this being done and it causes all sorts of havoc... they thought their entire site was hacked. So, it depends on how much fun you want to have with them.

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We did exactly whatb Scott is talking about to another hardware review website that was basiclly cut and pasting hardware reviews from other sites and calling them their own. Everyone that had one of their review plagerised or that had a news story listed on that site redirected all image requests from the site to some nice "plagerism is illegal" images and some not so nice "explicative deleted" images.

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Does the redirect use any bandwidth?
No.

 

Sure, I'd love to put up something nasty but what's the point?

 

It does not have to be 'nasty', just clever. The point would be that the hot linking would be halted quickly (well depending on your 'cleverness').

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It does not have to be 'nasty', just clever.

 

Exactly, I had a little goth girl pulling a pic of a sword called the sword of justice in her little blog. I made a image of a nun saying "I am the sword of Gods justice". It wasn't nasty and I knew it would irk the heck out her at the same time.

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I made a image of a nun saying "I am the sword of Gods justice".
Perfect!

 

And Ty as Rob said

...it stopped pretty fast

 

I guess I should clarify, or someone with more knowledge than me, a redirect would still uses bandwidth. They have to access your server to 'read' the redirect.

 

You are talking about a very, very small amount but they still are 'using' your server. The best solution is to get them to stop using it altogether. If an email does not get the results a clever image will. In other words, I personally would not do the redirect.

Edited by TCH-Scott
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I'm sure someone else has a better idea, but I can think of two ways to check to see if someone has linked to you.

 

In your stats, if a page with photos seems to be getting a lot of hits directly from the outside rather than from a page within your site, that would be a good clue.

 

In Google, you can do an advanced search to find out what other sites have linked to your site.

 

For Natural Images and Monarch Mountain, you currently have only a few sites linked to your home page.

 

If you find a page in the stats that seems to be getting a lot of hits, try Google to see who has linked to it.

 

I don't know how this would work if they linked directly to the image rather than to the html page, though.

 

I am going to watch this discussion to see what else is suggested.

 

This is an interesting question.

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