Since the Uber-Review recently experienced the worst case of hotlinking in our short but illustrious career, I had to add hotlink protection to the site. I would like to ensure that all the readers of the site who had images present in their favorite news reader are still able to see images. If not please leave a comment and which news reader you use and I will try my best to make it work.
So, what was the worst case of hotlinking ever?Here is the story.
When I opened up my email on Monday January 22, one email stood out. I’m not going to name drop but it was from a high ranking official at Digg. com. The email stated that this loser copied the top ten annoying alarm clock article and it’s on the front page of digg right now. Not only did this site copy the whole story without credit they had hotlinked every image. That’s 10 images per pageview x 2 MB per image x 20,000 pageviews = lots of stolen bandwidth.
Now the part that really gets my blood boiling is that I left a comment on the offending blog stating “I did not appreciate the fact that he stole the whole story, and it was really low to hotlink every image.” The site edited the comment to this:
“Thanks for using my content from my original post. That’s pretty nice of you”
Can you believe the nerve. They even edited other comments who expressed similar concerns after mine. The blog that stole all the bandwidth finally changed all images to the image shack (after it was off the Digg front page) and never apologized or gave proper credit for the stealing. I’m sorry about the rant but I had to let everyone know why the change happened in their feeds.
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6 responses
Jan 26, 2007 at 3:37 pm
It’s really pathetic when people steal your content and then give you a double whammy with hotlinking the images and stealing your bandwidth.
Jan 26, 2007 at 5:23 pm
Yeah, I noticed the images were acting up :/ too bad this happened (leechers), not the first time though (different sites) so I wasn’t surprised.
And I see the things you post getting reposted on several others sites…
I get [X]s in Feedreader 3.07, http://www.feedreader.com Just have to add that I love your blog, but I’m always way too stressed out to leave a comment, thought I should do this more often as I love your stuff
Jan 26, 2007 at 10:40 pm
Yes that makes me mad too. Unfortunately, not everyone has the ethical nature and crosses the line. Plagiarism is just bad. I recommend http://copyscape.com. It is free and allows you to find who on the web that has copied you without linking back.
Jan 27, 2007 at 7:37 am
That just sucks, sites that blatantly steal other peoples hard work should be shut down. You could report the site to the hosting provider.
Jan 28, 2007 at 12:47 am
As a rookie blogger, I’ve never even fathomed the problems that would occur if someone decided to hotlink your photos, especially if it’s dugg. Is there anyway to prevent this?
Jan 28, 2007 at 3:41 pm
Thanks everyone for your comments,
Jay, there are ways to prevent hotlinking from occurring. If your hosting company allows access to the server, you can add a script to the .htaccess file with what ever parameters you wish to set. Meaning you could allow certain sites to access pictures but prevent the rest from hotlinking. You can also control what the person who hotlinks ends up seeing on their site, a 403 error, a link back to your site or if you want to be really mean, a nasty image.
You can search the web for various scripts to use. I would share mine but it’s not working properly and therefore disabled it temporarily. I hope that helps.
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