Do you prevent hotlinking of images on your server? Did you do it just to do it, or was it becoming a problem, leeching all of your bandwidth?
I've never done it before because it's never been a problem (yet). I probably would when needed, but I do know what it's like to be the hotlinker seeing the annoying "don't hotlink you idiot" image after you post.
bandwidth is cheap these days, so that should no be a problem. I do not worry about hotlinking. Who has the time to check all of the images posted to see if their hotlinked?
If you had Albums enabled on AA and people posted a picture hosted on AA as an image link, when people quoted the picture www.adminaddict would show up. Seems like inexpensive (and classy) advertising to me. wouldn't the google ranks go up for AA when that happens?
You don't manually check. You set it up on your server. Haven't you ever seen when somebody tries to post an image (using the IMG code, for example) and the result is an unexpected "Do not hotlink our images" image? That's what hotlink prevention is.
How could you make it so that if/when someone uses one of the pics on your site that your URL was listed with it when it displayed? Would it just be easier to use something like a watermark mod like this .... PB Watermark Album Images - vBulletin.org Forum
Its pretty easy. Just a few lines in your .htaccess like here: Stop Hotlinking with htaccess. Test your Image Hotlink Protection with our Hotlink Checker from altlab.com.
In your .htaccess To disallow hotlinking Code: RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$ RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?mydomain.com/.*$ [NC] RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg|png|bmp)$ - [F] To display an alternate file (such as one that says come visit this site to see the image): Code: RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$ RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?mydomain.com/.*$ [NC] RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg|png|bmp)$ http://www.mydomain.com/replacementimage.jpg [R,L] And here is a link that will explain how to watermark hotlinked images: Tutorials - Smarter hotlink prevention
Sorry I did not respond, thanks for the info. This thread might make a fantastic article! I can envision having a subtle watermark being useful for my needs.
We receive dozens of hits from google images a day, though none of them are hosted on our server (with the exception of an avatar here and there) but if we did, a hotlink watermark would definitely be implemented I find just a nice little gradient black to grey bar with the domain name in white looks best while still drawing attention, people won't be afraid to repost the image elsewhere because it doesn't have a huge: HOSTED AT URIMGSFTW.COM!!#!!!!!@ across it
