Hotlinking Thieves

my space thieves

I was spending some geek time looking through my stats since I hadn’t done that in a very long time. I had to update my .htaccess according to the Dreamhost Drupal Docs so I could get access to the stats directory.

After doing this, and looking at the monthly stats I noticed that there were a *lot* of myspace referrals. Checking a few of the links I could see that tons of people were hotlinking one of my pictures.

Quick google search and I found this page: Preventing image hotlinking: An improved tutorial. In the comments there was the exact example of what I was looking for. Copy paste, upload the new .htaccess. Nothing like the taste of sweet success.

I double checked by reloading one of the myspace thieving posts, and there was a missing image. Perfect. Sometime I want to create an image to send to the thieves instead of the blankness they see.