Stop Bandwidth Theft Mod Rewrite

Major Joined: Jan 13, 2003 Posts: 892

I use this nice example to prevent hot linking images.

Code:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www.)?this.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^https://(www.)?this.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www.)?froogle.google.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule .(gif|jpg|png)$ - [F]

This works nice allows froogle and my domain (this.com) to grab images.

But I do have a question. Will this block google image search? I think it would but don't know of any of our images to test that.

Lieutenant Joined: May 29, 2003 Posts: 231

It will block Google (as well as anyone else) from displaying images from your pages unless Google uses the "froogle" subdomain. For the image search, it kinda looks like they pull it from the cache. So, you probably should either add all subdomains form Google or add their IPs.

If your server does not automatically add a slash on the domain name, you might want to change the first two to get rid of the trailing slash like this: http://(www.)?this.com.*$ . If you have pages on a subdomain, you'll need to add another rule or modify this one to include them.

Nuke Cops Founder Joined: Nov 14, 2002 Posts: 5939

I've never implemented that here because of the uploads section. I don't mind if its used, but if it ever got abused, then the service would turn premium.

Lieutenant Joined: May 29, 2003 Posts: 231

Sixone shows graphics, but it could be used for any extension. If used, it doesn't prevent people, who come to your site, from downloading. It prevents folks from direct linking to your files from their sites. If you made downloads a premium service or available only to those who sign in, you would still need to protect the directory contents. If someone knew the url to the files, he could still download everything.

I haven't had any problems at all with attempted hotlinking....knock on wood. Mine has been keeping out damn spybots. I have a friend who had problems with the bots wandering into his download directory and running up his bandwidth by constantly trying to download files. An entry in robots.txt fixed it, but it was kinda funny watching it happen.

Major Joined: Jan 13, 2003 Posts: 892

Yeah I'm fairly sure this is the basic code gallery uses if you choose during config to not allow hotlinking.

Steve:
You'd just add the robots useragent to your robots text.
User-agent: Steeler
Disallow: /
or
User-agent: Steeler
Disallow: /images

Something like that. This is kinda why I was playing with this.
I like the idea of blocking but for those I allow.
It's interesting anyway. I might change foogle.google.com to to google.com (froogle still works then from the testing I did do).

Major Joined: Jan 13, 2003 Posts: 892

Ands thanks to MikeMiles for pointing out the importance of the trailing slash. That should about polish off the use instructions.