[tech] Referrer Checking for Hotlinking

[Davyd Madeley]

On Sat, 2006-05-06 at 19:14 +0800, Cameron Patrick wrote:
> loki wrote:
> 
> > On Sat, May 06, 2006 at 05:07:52PM +0800, Davyd Madeley wrote:
> > >As an idea to try and cut down our traffic bill some more (or web
> > >backtraffic is ~1/11th of our outbound traffic) I knocked up a script to
> > >analyse our referrers to look for hotlinking.
> > 
> > Could you have a default .htaccess with something like the attached?
> 
> I regularly "hotlink" images from my UCC web space in my blog (hosted on
> a different domain), and wouldn't like to see the ability to do that
> vanish.

Indeed, being able to link to images from your blog &c. is today one of
the main uses of your UCC webspace. This pushes out a heap of traffic
thanks to the planets, but not a considerable amount.

The biggest hotlinkers would seem to be Myspace users, but this wouldn't
seem to be an incredible amount.

One of the biggest downloads is that damned Java deb of mine, which
would cost us about 70MB of backtraffic. I might replace it with a 302
redirect that redirects to my blog post about how to generate the .deb
for yourself.

> That said, if members were warned about it well beforehand, and could
> override it where necessary, it's not a bad policy.

I was simply thinking that we document a method for people to prevent
hotlinking and have a method to get in touch with people who seem to be
getting hotlinked if it's getting expensive.

In summary: I certainly don't want to drop the ability to "hotlink", but
I would like to get an idea of how much traffic we're pushing out and
how much of it is related to hotlinking.

--d

-- 
Davyd Madeley

http://www.davyd.id.au/
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