I have disabled hotlinking of images on all of my web sites.
What is hotlinking?
A good explanation of hotlinking can be found
here,
essentially hotlinking involves remote web sites linking content
directly from another web site via URL. Hotlinking is typically
practiced in the blog sphere when a blog owner links to an image hosted
on another blog/web site.
What is wrong with hotlinking?
Hotlinking steals bandwidth from the server hosting the content.
Hotlinking should be avoided by downloading the referenced content from
the original host site and hosting the copy locally.
What can be done to prevent hotlinking?
When a web server receives a request for content; an HTTP referrer
string, indicating the URL of the requesting page is packaged with the
request. If referrer string indicates a remote web site, and the URL
extension indicates content, the request can be blocked. Certain web
servers can detect requests for content using an
.htaccess file. Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) uses HTTP filters instead of
.htaccess files.
Michael R. Brumm has developed
LeechBlocker, an ISAPI filter to block hotlinking requests.
Michael was good enough to provide the source to his filter. I have
made some code changes to detect
nGallery photo requests, which uses the
.aspx extension. I wanted to allow remote sites to reference my blog and nGallery pages (also
.aspx)
but not the photos directly, so I only block certain requests where the
address matches nGallery's URL pattern. My changes can be downloaded
here.
How can I tell if my web site is safe from hotlinking?
http://www.htmlbasix.com/disablehotlinking.shtml provides an .htaccess generator and checking tool for your web site.