The first line of the following Nginx snippet defines which file extensions are protected from hotlinking. The next line defines which websites are allowed to link to these file types. This must always include your website domain as well as any other domains which require access. Any website that is not defined in the snippet below will receive a 403 error upon trying to refer your assets.
A particular directory can also be protected from hotlinking. In the snippet below we have defined the /media/ directory and have set the allowed referrers to solely .yourwebsite.com (the period before the domain means that all subdomains are also included)
To serve alternate content when hotlinking is detected. You can set up your .htaccess file to actually display different content when hotlinking is attempted. This is more commonly done with images suggesting your displeasure of this activity, such as serving up an "Angry Man" image in place of the hotlinked one. Once again, replace example.com on lines 3 and 4 with your own domain name.
An example of hotlinking. Say I like the image on your website, and I want that image on my site. If I use the full URL of your image on my site, the image is downloading from your site every time someone looks at mine. This means I am using your bandwidth for the image. When you enable Hotlink Protection, I cannot steal your bandwidth anymore.
They can block hotlinking by modifying the .htaccess file. While at it, they can substitute the images that you may have hotlinked with warning messages. Some may troll you as in the famous case of Oatmeal vs Huffington Post.
Unsplash is a clear example of an image service that allows hotlinking. But you have to use the links provided by the API. It allows them to collect useful metrics for image creators such as the number of downloads. Another case that qualifies as permitted use is uploading images to image hosting services and hotlinking to other sites. These services are also clear about their hotlinking policy. For instance, some allow hotlinking on forums but not on blogs.
But the main question here is, keeping all the copyright issues aside for a moment, if we look into hotlinking from an SEO perspective, are there any benefits in getting your images hotlinked by another website? Would hotlinking be worth as much as regular links?
Last year, Patrick Altoft wrote an exceptional piece and script to benefit from sites which hotlink to images, embedding an alt attribute and image title in the linking code, making this hotlinking even more powerful.
In most cases, hotlinking is also illegal. When you buy a photo from a stock photo website. The license is for you alone, not for anyone who decides to copy the image URL and use it themselves. You must protect your legal rights as a license holder.
Since MediaWiki revision 1.13.0 you can directly embed media from Wikimedia Commons into your own MediaWiki-based wiki using InstantCommons. This method has numerous advantages over hotlinking, and from MediaWiki version 1.16 it can be switched on by setting a single configuration variable (see mw:Special:MyLanguage/InstantCommons#Configuration for setup details).
Remember that as with hotlinking, when using a Wikimedia Commons image via InstantCommons, any changes (including improvements, vandalism and deletion) will directly affect your website. Consider the pros and cons of this for your intended use.
Back when I wrote the article, this basic hotlinking technique was widely employed and taken as the de facto standard method of preventing hotlinking scumbags. Although simplistic, there are several key aspects to this technique:
For example, if you are protecting .jpg, gif, and png file types, and would like to serve hotlinkers a copy of your hairy hole, you will need to prepare a version of the image in each of the three file formats (e.g., hairy-hole.jpg, hairy-hole.gif, and hairy-hole.png). Then, to summon the matching file type when hotlinking is detected, replace the last line in your ruleset as follows:
Yes, you are correct. It turns out that the presence of the [OR] operators in the RewriteCond directives require that all of the corresponding conditions prove true before implementing the final RewriteRule. In other words, for an image not to be blocked, the referrer would have to satisfy all of the [OR] conditions, which would be impossible. Needless to say, the [OR] operators have been removed from the anti-hotlinking directives.
Neocities has put measures in place to prevent hotlinking of content from non-Neocities sites. This is a part of our process to improve the performance of Neocities web sites, provide more free space for our users, and ensure the site's future sustainability.
If you need to store files for hotlinking use, there are plenty of alternatives. Imgur for example is a place you can store images that can be embedded by any site. Again, this is bad practice because you have to trust Imgur to not delete the image in the future for your site to continue loading. You're still better off hosting the images on the site's own server.
The hotlinking policy currently applies to all free sites, however you can remove the hotlinking policy by upgrading to the Neocities Supporter Plan. That said, for the philosophy reasons mentioned above, we still strongly recommend that you don't use Neocities for hotlinking to other sites.
Hot-linking (or hotlinking) is a process of re-streaming of the streaming media. This is critical for any business which has premium access to their assets. It you have any exclusive content, you're loosing money in case of hot-linking.
We added the X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff header to our raw URL responses way back in 2011 as a first step in combating hotlinking. This has the effect of forcing the browser to treat content in accordance with the Content-Type header. That means that when we set Content-Type: text/plain for raw views of files, the browser will refuse to treat that file as JavaScript or CSS.
A hotlinking takes place when someone embeds content (images, music, videos, and documents mostly) from your site in another site with the direct file URL. Effectively, the other site is stealing bandwidth and generating unnecessary traffic hits on your website consuming your hosting resources. Hotlink protection prevents this by blocking other websites from directly linking to files on your Joomla website.
The best place to check for hotlinking would be your web host's web stats page. Have you noticed there any weird huge bandwidth (not traffic) in the last days, weeks? If so, this should be an indication that someone is stealing your content.
Whether any of your website media resources have been hotlinked or not, you can take preventive measures at any time. Hotlink protection can be a valuable way that may keep your content and hosting account safe. Unfortunately, but Joomla does not have built-in options that could protect against hotlinking, so use one of the options below.
Hotlinking is a harmful practice that might cause several problems such as bandwidth and asset theft. Preventing hotlinking is an easy task, and you don't need any Joomla plugin. So there is no reason to postpone this task. Please share your ideas with us in the comments section. And stay with us for more useful tips & tricks!
The available methods for preventing image hotlinking require access to running scripts directly on the server of your site, which is not something that's currently possible on Shopify. That being the case, if you'd rather not take the route of issuing DMCA notices, you can use an app to protect those images. We've a number of them available - I'd suggest checking these ones out:
Right to the point, why do people think that disabling right click stops this? It does not. Any site that disables right click literally slows me down by 2 seconds (1 time). All I do is click a button in my browser that disables the script and viola, right click. On top of that, there is a lot of bot traffic that scrapes the images and does not even load these scripts. Why would I want to pay up to an extra $60 PER YEAR just to disable right click? Disable hotlinking should be built in, I am paying you for it.
This is an easy fix. Create a section in the settings that has a checkbox to disable hotlinking. Then create a form field where you can create a whitelist of sites. Auto poplulate it with the most common whitelisted sites and let users add/remove as needed. Then inject the information into the htaccess file. Many cdn's have a way to disable hotlinking. Guess what, THIS WILL SAVE YOU BANDWITH AND SERVER MONEY. Another straight forward "feature" that shopify does not have.
Totally understand your frustration. One of the apps I'd listed, Content Protection, does allow for preventing hotlinking; the others provide different capabilities, which is why I'd offered a range in case it didn't quite suit your needs.
All Geek Things goes onto to describe how you can use Google to investigate which folks are hotlinking your content and update WordPress appropriately. I am not sure that I have personally been a victim of this particular kind of malfeasance, but it is relatively easy to guard against it using your ASP.NET web.config file as follows:
This blocks almost everybody and even goes a step further by silently redirecting the offenders to an image of my choosing (stop_hotlinking.jpg in this example). However, there are many use cases where hotlinking is desired (Pinterest is one example that comes to mind), and so being able to provide exceptions (white lists) is also helpful, and the rewriteMap section accomplishes that.
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