No more hotlinking images
For those who use Apache 2.x, this is a nice trick to keep people from hotlinking your images. I’ve seen a few variants of it, but this one I picked up most recently from a slashdot comment, of all places.
Make sure you have enabled mod_rewrite, then add this in your .htaccess file for any directory with images in it:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?yourdomain\.com [NC]
RewriteRule .* /files/goatse.jpg [NC,L]
to redirect to an awful image, or use my own personal variant:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?sitename.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg|png)$ - [F]
which doesn’t return *anything* if someone else hotlinks your images. If they like your images enough, they can like them enough to save a copy on their own webserver.
