Help with bloggers and direct link to images

[Steve Kreis]

Somebody help. The bloggers are driving me nuts. They are direct linking to
images on my site thus driving up my traffic to an artificially high level.
What I would like to do is prevent them from putting direct links to images
in their blog. I don't care if they steal the image. They can even right
click and save, if they want -- it's the linking that bothers me. Short of
encrypting all 450 pages, is there any other way out?

Steve

[William Tasso]

Steve Kreis wrote:

Somebody help. The bloggers are driving me nuts. They are direct
linking to images on my site thus driving up my traffic to an
artificially high level. What I would like to do is prevent them from
putting direct links to images in their blog. I don't care if they
steal the image. They can even right click and save, if they want --
it's the linking that bothers me. Short of encrypting all 450 pages,
is there any other way out?

oft quoted suggestions include a regular chamge of name for you image
directory and some global replace to suit as well as leaving replacements
for 'popular' images which include 'go find your own' message.

there are some server side scripted techniques which achieve the desired
result. here's an example in asp that seems to do the job: <
http://williamtasso.com/components/image.asp >. I believe a similar result
is achievable directly with Apache configuration options.

--
William Tasso - http://WilliamTasso.com

[Stan Brown]

In article <bi*******************@news.demon.co.uk> in
comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html, David Dorward
<do*****@yahoo.com> wrote:

Philipp Lenssen wrote:

It seems that still would cost bandwidth, even if people might stop
linking to the image after a while.

So make it a tiny image.

http://dorward.me.uk/tmp/bad.png
- 429 bytes (not kilobytes, _bytes_).

Done! I'll link to it starting right away. :-)

--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Cortland County, New York, USA
http://OakRoadSystems.com/
HTML 4.01 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/
validator: http://validator.w3.org/
CSS 2 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/
validator: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

[Eric Bohlman]

David Dorward <do*****@yahoo.com> wrote in
news:bi******************@news.demon.co.uk:

Stan Brown wrote:

Somebody help. The bloggers are driving me nuts. They are direct
linking to images on my site thus driving up my traffic to an
artificially high level.http://www.allmyfaqs.com/faq.pl?Prevent_bandwidth_theft

That says "it will prevent your images being leeched unless the
leeching sofware [sic] fakes its referer [sic] (a lot do)."

While that's better than nothing, do you have any more suggestions
with greater coverage?

It also says: it checks to see if it is your domain requesting the
.gifs/.jpgs/.pngs and if not substitutes an image (bad.gif) to display
instead of the one requested.

-- i.e. stops direct linking.

I'd also put in a check to see if it's coming from a Google cached page and
supply the original image in that case. It's really annoying to pull up a
cached paged and see a big ugly "don't link directly" background image
covering it.