I rarely check what's going on with my bandwidth. I have usually no reason to and wouldn't know what to do one way or another if something was up, but now with my short on my site I wanted to check what was going on and found that a couple of people hotlinking site images as sigs on boards is actually sucking a huge chunk of bandwidth. They are only small images but the amount of times they are accessed must be quite a lot.

Aside from joining the particular boards and having words with them, is there any way I can stop this?

TIA

Edit: Oh, I should probably point out that I'm no technical wizard and made my page in dreamweaver because it meant I didn't have to know any html.

Check with whatever service/company is hosting your site, you should be able to disable hotlinking.

What's the URL to your site?  I can usually tell what type of server you're running by what the 404 page spits out.

If it's running on Apache, you're in luck.  There's this nifty thing called .htaccess that you can configure to disable hotlinking.  You'll have to look up an FAQ or wait for a reply from someone here more knowledgable than I.  I don't know what you want to do with the people hotlinking your stuff.  You can make it so they see an alternate image, kinda like what Tripod does with people who hotlink their images. >:)

Good luck.

I've had that happen to me during the occasional times I've checked my access logs. Most times I don't mind, but some places really annoyed me, especially forums that allow images to be linked directly in posts. So for some that I found, I uploaded a new image that said something like, "This image is being used WITHOUT PERMISSION from (my website name)." I personally like the "I AM A BANDWIDTH STEALER" ones...I remember the first I'd ever heard of it was this auction on eBay in which the seller was hotlinking to another person's pictures. The guy found out and uploaded some hilarious photos in place of the originals.

That's why I started splashing my URL across all my larger images.

Anyway....so yeah, first thing I'd go for is Amber's suggestion that you make use of your .htaccess file if your server runs Apache. You can figure out how to configure it and how to access it by doing searches online -- that's how I figured out how to do it. But BE CAREFUL because your webhost might have a standard .htaccess file already uploaded, with certain permissions and file paths as the default, and if you upload a new .htaccess without checking on that first, you may totally screw yourself over.

Second, I'd go for the image-replacing route. Sure, it'll still take bandwidth, but you can bet that they'll stop hotlinking to your stuff really fast.

The site is www.detainedthemovie.com

I went for changing images as the quick solution for now and it already seems to have worked. Thanks!

Okay, now you MUST give us some URLs that had linked to your images and are now sporting the new (and hopefully embarrassing) pics. ^_~

Nah, I just left a polite little message about how hotlinking was killing me. Once I saw that the image was not linked any more I took it down. Next time though I might get more imaginative...

Changing the address or the image names is definitely a good short term solution. Disabling hotlinking is, of course, the best solution (if you can do that). I finally figured out that people were hotlinking to mine because they came up on Google image searches. So what I did to get around that is create a robots.txt file that disallowed search bots from indexing my pics directory, among other places. There's a nifty generator here - just follow the directions:
http://www.webtoolcentral.com/webmaster … generator/

Good luck.

Ah, thanks for that. I've been curious about the robots file - I've noticed it showing up all the time as a 404 from other sites because I don't have one but I was always curious why they were looking for the file in the first place. Thanks.

Edit: And, as it turns out, I can disable hotlinking and have now done so!

That's exactly how I found out about it too, heh. I was like, "Wtf is robots.txt and why are they looking for it on my web site?"

Excellent!