Please, NO hotlinking
Combing through the logs, I noticed some strange referrers. So I start to look into it and low and behold, someone made a post on some message board and hotlinked a picture from my site in their post. Please DO NOT do this! This wastes steals my (or anyone else’s) bandwidth and will only piss people off.
In case you don’t know, hotlinking is when you incorporate anything into a webpage (be it pictures, or other types of files) by linking it from someone else’s site. In my case, someone made a post with an inline image in it. Instead of uploading the picture to the message board, they linked the source of the image to my site. Now, every time someone reads the post, the message board goes out to my server to fetch the picture. Multiply this by hundreds upon hundreds of people that read the post, and you can begin to see the bandwidth drain it causes.
On that note, I implemented some rules to help combat the problem. Let me know if you have problems accessing any pictures on the site. My changes should be safe and only prevent hotlinking, but you never know.
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