Tone Parsons

I did a little searching via google today (I LOVE google!!!!) and found the solution for how to deal with those wacky hotlinking kids who use livejournal, blogspot, and myspace.

Modify your .htaccess file!

I added the following code to the top of my .htaccess:

# Begin hotlink image replacement
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?opendirviewer\.com/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?myspace\.com/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?blogspot\.com/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?livejournal\.com/ [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ images/tp_no_hotlink.gif [L]
# End hotlink image replacement

What it does is look at the requesting URL for an image. If the request came from one of the 4 domains listed, it replaces it with the image below.

Sure… showing the image still takes up bandwidth, but it’s only 7.49kb, and it will perhaps educate those little smacktards to stop what they’re doing (and still lets me hotlink to my own images from other locatons).

And before you think to yourself “Hey… I don’t use those 4 services… I can still hotlink to Tone’s crap!!”, think again.

I check my logs every single day (yeah… I’m bored). If I see your domain, it gets added to the idiot bucket too.

Choose life!