Hi,

My site offers several video files that I'm glad to offer to my visitors but
I'm disgusted to see links to my online .wmv files on various forums or
other sites, it really steals a lot of bandwidth. Can I block that somehow?

"96" <no@mail.com> wrote:

Google groups search aww for "hotlinking" and "bandwidth theft" and
you'll find lots of approaches, I'd just give you the information but
I haven't actually used any of the various approaches yet so it would
be second-hand and probably incorrect.

--
http://www.ren-prod-inc.com/hug_soft...action=contact

96 wrote:
http://underscorebleach.net/jotsheet...taccess-apache

Your best bet would be to show an alternate image/video ADVERTISING your
site. That's what I did for my sites. Worked quite nice too. That way
anyone attempting a hotlink will be essentially advertising your sites
wherever they try to hotlink. Make it a short bandwith friendly
clip/image and connect it in your .htaccess file.

I agree only first you might need to develop a way to identify theft
attempts so as to send the alternative file.

Don't try to use http_referer because that can be spoofed easily, and
besides it won't work for clients behind many firewalls.

The only way I know of is to serve the files with a program and set up
a coded authentication process. Not all that hard to do if you can
handle a bit of server side programming.

hth,

Marty

"96" <no@mail.com> wrote in
news:Uk7Lf.51322$dW3.20803@newssvr21.news.prodigy. com:

You need to set up an anti-leaching script for your video directory. I use
autoindex with anti-leeching disabled.


Judy
--
http://www.technohippie.com/
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...20914894906000
*** Free account sponsored by SecureIX.com ***
*** Encrypt your Internet usage with a free VPN account from http://www.SecureIX.com ***

I'm having leeching problems with MP3's lately. I maintain a legacy
website for a singer with over 24 hours of performance audio from a 30
year career. I want people to listen but I want her to be given credit
for the performance.

Instead of blocking the traffic, when I detect leeching I make a
version of the audio file with a spoken message at the end of the track
that says, in the friendliest tone, for many more fine performances by
"artist name" go to "artist name.com" By putting it at the end of the
track the web master of the leeching site is less likely to notice so
it may stay there longer and generate more referrals for my web site.
This seems to me a more inlightened approach than blocking--internet
tia chi.


96 wrote:

On 15 Mar 2006 17:41:03 -0800, charlie put finger to keyboard and
typed:

I did someting similar when an image on one of my sites started
getting hotlinked from a number of websites. (I'd taken some photos at
a U2 gig and various fan forums had picked up on one of them that
happened to be particularly good). Rather than just block the traffic,
I replaced the image with one that had a caption across the bottom
saying "For more photos of this gig, see www.example.com".

Mark
--
Visit: http://www.FridayFun.net - jokes, lyrics and ringtones
Listen: http://www.goodge.co.uk/files/dweeb.mp3 - you'll love it!