sts Posted February 2, 2004 Posted February 2, 2004 Are there really a lot of people who steal your bandwidth? I created hotlink.png to redirect to and so far I see only negative effect. People who use online translators to read your pages or who look at Google's cache see this hotlink.png splashed all over your pages. The most unpleasant thing is that this hotlink.png gets stuck in IE cache and people still see it even if they visit your original page So, is hotlink protection worth it? Quote
DarqFlare Posted February 2, 2004 Posted February 2, 2004 Nobody really steals my bandwidth... Though I do have some problems with people using my web images. Maybe I'll turn on hotlinking eventually. Quote
Virtual Imager Posted February 3, 2004 Posted February 3, 2004 I think it might be more important to people like myself (artists) who use it to protect original artwork that is our livelihood (or so we hope!). I would be horrified to see my work displayed on another site as someone else's... and even more enraged if they were stealing my bandwidth to do it. Quote
TCH-Bruce Posted February 3, 2004 Posted February 3, 2004 There is really only one way to stop people from stealing images. Don't post them on your site. Sad, but true. <_> Quote
Virtual Imager Posted February 3, 2004 Posted February 3, 2004 Well I'm content with the fact that the little jpegs I put up on my site would look like sh-- enlarged and with the fact that by using hotlink protection, no one can link to them and put them on their own site and take credit for them. I'd love to display them bigger to give people a sense of their detail and impact, but that's the trade-off. As you say... sad, but true. Quote
sts Posted February 3, 2004 Author Posted February 3, 2004 I personally saw only image search robots hotlinking images. People tend to upload images to their server, some even provide a link back No? Quote
DarqFlare Posted February 3, 2004 Posted February 3, 2004 My problem is that there are tons of links to my website through link exchanges and voting links for my website's poll... A lot of people just reference the image to my website directly for their image link rather than download it and use it there. One thing that somebody could do to steal your image if they really wanted to: take a screenshot and use Photoshop. Hotlinking only keeps them from using the image off of your website, but if they screenshot it, they can recreate it and steal it. Though, that's a can of worms for another discussion. Quote
TCH-Rob Posted February 5, 2004 Posted February 5, 2004 I had a little goth girl linking to a picture on my site of a sword she got from her work and wanted to show all of her friends what it looked like. Well it was live journal and the content was syndicated to all of her friends sites. I was getting a few thousand hits to that image each day. I like to visit the sites that link to mine and see where people come from. I could tell by the writing in the journal that she wasn't too into religion so I renamed the image she was linking to and uploaded an image of a nun with the name of the sword on it. The linking stopped fast and I got to see how she felt about the change on her journal. It can be a bit of fun sometimes I think it depends on who is doing it and the severity of the resources it is using. Quote
Virtual Imager Posted February 5, 2004 Posted February 5, 2004 so I renamed the image she was linking to and uploaded an image of a nun with the name of the sword on it. That's great! Quote
MikeJ Posted February 5, 2004 Posted February 5, 2004 Worst I've seen is when someone sent out massive amounts of spam and used an image on our site as the background in their HTML email (linked from our site). Quote
Virtual Imager Posted February 5, 2004 Posted February 5, 2004 Worst I've seen is when someone sent out massive amounts of spam and used an image on our site as the background in their HTML email (linked from our site). Ouch! Quote
sts Posted February 27, 2004 Author Posted February 27, 2004 Answering my own question. There are people who want to hotlink your images woooot This is not a horror story, though, just a little example. This person is hotlinking 7 pictures ~150K total, receiving 1 "oops" picture - 567 bytes Folks, save bandwidth! Use hotlink protection! Quote
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