Hi, all. Just a note to explain my current situation. You may remember that I dropped out of sight last month – it’s about to happen again, if it hasn’t already. I have been targeted by an Italian streaming video site (http://italia-film.com) who have hotlinked to whole bunch of my posters as the access to their videos, and they are slaughtering my bandwidth. I can’t block them directly because they’re just acting as a referral point for their visitors. However, I have put hotlink protection on everything with a “stop thief!’ notice, tried to block the site’s main IP, and also replaced the chief offender, my Zombi poster, with another theft warning. I can only hope this eventually forces them to cut me off. If anyone has any other ideas about how to fight this, please let me know!
I may say that I am astonished to learn how many people there are in the world who evidently have nothing else to do but watch Zombi…
#1 by Naomi on June 14, 2010 - 8:32 pm
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Bummer. I’m not sure how involved you are with the back-end administration part of your website, but this might be useful: http://altlab.com/htaccess_tutorial.html
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#2 by Mr. Rational on June 15, 2010 - 9:57 am
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Leave it to the Italians to copy everything.
#3 by Bryan on June 15, 2010 - 11:32 am
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Sorry for the suckage. I know little to nil about web stuff. Too bad you can’t just have an alternate image for them that has some tentacle porn, or some such.
#4 by KeithA on June 15, 2010 - 12:56 pm
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could you put the images somewhere else, like flickr or some such service, so it’s their drain and not yours? Of course, then you have to change all your code. I still say a tactical strike is in order
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#5 by supersonic on June 16, 2010 - 1:55 pm
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One may be forced to periodically move and rename all of one’s images, and update all the links to same.
I’ve only had to do this with one file at a time on my website… most recently, the MP3 of “Ninja Rap”… I’ve never had it happen wholesale.
One way it might be doable is to put all your images in a folder named e.g. “Posters_9234789783450”, and every few months or as needed, rename that folder to “Images_SLDKKWJHKJV” or something, and do a global search&replace to change all the links.
#6 by Ken on June 17, 2010 - 5:21 pm
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Naomi #1 has the best mechanism. I would add that most hosting services provide a simplified interface, where all you have to do is select a directory (your root, naturally) and choose something like “only permit access from aycyas.com”.
If your host doesn’t support .htaccess, or doesn’t have a simplified interface, you might want to consider switching.
#7 by Carl on June 18, 2010 - 6:49 pm
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You can refuse to serve images unless the Referer [sic] header is from aycyas.com. Many photo sites do this.
You can get the Italian site thrown off the net, too, by complaining to their ISP.
#8 by Andres Kievsky on June 23, 2010 - 4:07 am
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What I do when something tries this on me is replace the offending image(s) with something disgusting – usually the image of a shock site, like lemonparty – or some hardcore gay porn.
I can assure you they don’t try it again after that 🙂