GRRRRR I'm sick of people hotlinking my avatar

[finlay666]

Basically I use an avatar of an animated sheep on a variety of forums (have now deleted this image and removed it due to a LOT of people hotlinking it (on various forums, a few I didnt mind, but im getting near my bandwidth limit so decided to 'encourage' them to reduce the amount)

so I changed it to something else (little frontier justice if you will)

as for a future method, does anyone know a way to stop the hotlinking, aside from having a load of different copies of the same image?

*link removed as it may start a flame war as one of said members is on here aswell*

[Tarffie]

You can create a hotlink protection .htaccess file which blocks all sites from linking to the items in that directory, except for the sites you define.

Knowing the internet there's probably a generator out there.

Edit: whoop, try this http://www.htaccesstools.com/hotlink-protection/

[chuckskull]

Most forums allow you to upload one rather than hotlink. I know hexus does.

And now you've removed it I cant for the life of me think what avatar you had.

[tiggerai]

Shaun?

[finlay666]

And now you've removed it I cant for the life of me think what avatar you had.

I didn't have one on here, I'll upload the one I did have though

I can pm a link to the screeshot of the person who was still hotlinking mine if you want....but don't want to make it public because the person concerned did nothing but b*tch and whine last night

EDIT: my avatar that was on the site is on now as mine on here

[moogle]

what you should do is, use the htaccess and restrict the image to be shown on all sites except the ones that you use them on.

[finlay666]

what you should do is, use the htaccess and restrict the image to be shown on all sites except the ones that you use them on.

problem was it WAS on the sites I am on (2 seperate people on 2 different forums that i post on)

so there wasnt much I could do about it...

[listy]

change your ones file name and put dodgy one for them LOL

just do that every now and again they might get annoyed or banned form the forums depending on image LOL

[moogle]

change your ones file name and put dodgy one for them LOL

just do that every now and again they might get annoyed or banned form the forums depending on image LOL

lol yea, ahahaha. that would be funny. i guess the only way to bypass them using your site is to upload one to imageshack.

[Lee H]

Best advice for avatar's is to load the image to a place like imageshack or similar and use the free bandwidth for it

I do that with a few avatarts I have at the 'other' place I frequent all the time and so far they've not been removed or ran out of bandwidth.

[finlay666]

change your ones file name and put dodgy one for them LOL

just do that every now and again they might get annoyed or banned form the forums depending on image LOL

I did....but im not posting the pic here because the person might see

There's a hidden clicky

[moogle]

well maybe in the future someone will develop a script where a unique id is on the page is placed where the avatar is being loaded and then your image server can detect if its you using the avatar or someone else. but thats too complex for such a minor thing

[finlay666]

yeah it would be....

Hope people find the clicky in my previous post though
(if you want to know who it was and what the image was that is)

[dave87]

ROFL, nice one

Even if they do nick your avatar, at least have the decency to host it on their own website...

[finlay666]

yeah one of them did later on using imageshack, but they had to remove it so I doubt they kept the links

kindof like Shmorky having his pics nicked by the guy from david and goliath...

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/custompc/phpb...c.php?t=223311 (I CBA to C+P it lol)

[dave87]

ugh, you have to register to view the link, any chance of a screenie?