Well, I’ve gone and done it… I’ve eliminated a stack of folks who were indulging in image swiping.
I’ve mentioned it before. Basically, I don’t have a problem with people using the images I post here, so long as they give credit and don’t steal bandwidth. Unfortunately, some folks do neither. And the biggest offenders have been the folks over at myspace.com. To the tune of close to 30,000 hits from uncredited links this week.
That’s right. Thirty thousand. In seven days.
Even at less than 32k an image, that’s close to a gigabyte of stolen bandwidth so far this month. I just can’t afford to be a free image host for these guys.
So, I did some poking around and learned something about the magic of .htaccess files.
Basically, with these, you can set individual rules for directories, controlling who can see stuff on your server, and how. These two simple lines in the access file for my image directory should take care of the problem:
SetEnvIf Referer “myspace.com” bang
Deny from env=bang
The first line checks to see if the request for the image is coming from myspace.com, and sets an environmental variable called “bang” if it is. The second line refuses the request if the variable “bang” exists.
That’s it! Quick & dirty, and hopefully effective.
Followup note: it’s working and it took less than 20 minutes for it to block 100 requests… Hopefully, that’ll take care of the problem.