Grrr. And request for aid

[selenay]

I was just taking a peak at the site stats for The Haven and noticed a sudden increase in hits and bandwidth. Hmm, thought I.

A brief trawl through the stats solved the problem: some enterprising little cretin has decided to use one of my wallpapers as the background for her website, linking directly from my servers.

Does anyone have any ideas on how I can stop this little creep in her tracks? I believe that it's probably something that I could do with an .htaccess file, if I only knew what I was doing with that.

And I've managed to write about 100 words of Serpent sequel. Erk. I'm getting distracted by Teyla/Weir plot bunnies. So not what I wanted to write.

Comments

[alyse]

You need to enable hotlink protection. If your webhost has cpanel, this is very easy, as there's usually a hotlink protection option in there somewhere. You will need to make sure, however, that you include your own domain name(s) in the list of permitted sites, or even your site won't be able to load the images.

And you're right about it being .htaccess if you can't do it the easy way. That I know less about, but I'd bet you a search on google of htaccess hotlink protection would pull up what you need :) Like, oh, this one, which came up first:

http://altlab.com/htaccess_tutorial.html

[selenay]

I suspect that my host won't let me do it the easy way. I'll have a look around the control panel when I have more time, but at the moment I'm going to go with the 'change the file name' solution until I've had time to look into .htaccess more thoroughly. Thanks for the link, though - looks like a good place to start.

[mmmchelle.livejournal.com]

I have no idea what to do to stop the person using the wallpaper, but Teyla/Weir plot bunnies are good bunnies.

[selenay]

*snicker* Not everyone would agree with that one.

::eyes yragg::

Nope, that ain't going to be the most popular opinion ;-)

[munchkinott.livejournal.com]

I'd change the filename and give her a low-res 'calling card' 'til you find a better solution...

'lookit me, I'm a minging bandwidth theiving troll!! lalalala - Oh and I am a moron too!' would work for me.

But then, I'm eeeeeeeeeevil. ¬_¬

I'm evil too!

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

That's exactly what I thought:

1) copy background to new image background2.gif/jpg
2) change your pages to use new background2
3) change original background image as munchkinott suggested

greatEVIL minds think alike! ;-)

Re: I'm evil too!

[selenay]

It's not a background that my pages use - just one of the wallpapers that I've made and told people not to hotlink to.

Bleh.

I'll be following munchie's suggestion until I find a permenant solution :-)

[selenay]

I know you're evil. But I suspect that I'll be doing exactly this tomorrow night, when I have time to make a really insulting graphic :-)

[elfinessy.livejournal.com]

okay - I have a script running that hubby wrote that stops someone doing that . It checks the access and then if it isn't a listed site, it swaps the image for another one.

Have emails from embarrassed people who've been caught.

Short term I'd rename the original file and replace the file with something he/she would regret having as a background.

[selenay]

Is there any chance that you could possibly let me take a peek at your script? Or ask your hubby to point me towards some resources? I'd like to make sure that this doesn't happen again, so having a script running seems like a better solution in the long term than renaming files whenever this happens.

I will be designing an insulting graphic tomorrow night, though :-)

[yragg.livejournal.com]

I shall kill those evil T/W bunnies.

Wants Serpent, wants it soon.

Sending you myxomatosis love for the bunnies.

[selenay]

You're gonna have to fight it out with mmmchelle for muse time, methinks.

I've just got to find some extra hours in the day. Or something.

Is it too soon to take a sabbatical from the job?