Hello all, I have a big problem on a site that I am running for a non-profit organization.

The problem is that hundreds of other sites are linking directly to this site. They display images, videos and offer downloads but they actually don't host these contents on their web space, but taking directly from this site, also not even commenting that those contents are taken from another site. For example they offer an image gallery but no image is on their own space, or give "download this video" but once you click the video is taken from a third site.

I don't know if I explained well (sorry for my not good english) the exact explaination is this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotlink

This causes the website to be very slow and a very high usage of bandwidth.

I wrote to some of those sites, someone understand, other take out the hotlinks for a few time and put it back, other just don't care, but many many other are impossible to contact and even is not possible to stay for hours to browse the referer logs and write email requesting "please don't link directly".

I know that is possible to set-up Apache or IIS to prevent this problem, but the site is on a shared hosting and my requests to the admins were ignored since now.

I also know that is possible to write php scripts that read stored images (also videos, zip files, etc) in a hidden folder, with an impossible name (something like "kwx32jkhg564hgj767gh23j3as", known only from the script side) and then send to the browser as a streaming feed, but this method is very heavy for the server, expecially if there are thousands visitors a day and Gb's of traffic.

How is possible to prevent this?
Is there a way in XOOPS to protect the contents?
Or is there a way in general to do this?

Thanks for any suggestion or opinion.

hello,
maybe with something like this ?
http://www.mymommybiz.com/seo/preventhotlinking.html

Quote:

Yes, only if I could, I know already how to do it with Apache settings, but the owner of the site bought a shared hosting solution and seems that you can only put html pages and contents, while you can't change any server settings or .htaccess file. Also the server is IIS (not my choise of course, I always get Linux hostings).

Thanks anyway for your reply.

..try ask the owner of the site to email the host and see if the host will do it for you/your site.

Many hosts will ask for your rewrite-mod and they will do it for you.