Personal websites, blog pages, etc. You can spend a lot of time, effort, and sometimes money setting them up and maintaining them. The pay-off is when you see lots of people visit your site, take an interest and even provide feedback. The annoyance comes when you notice in your logs that a select handful of images are being downloaded a helluva lot more than every other image on your server, and further scruitiny shows that it wasn’t even your own website requesting them – it was someone elses.

So you go and have a look at the referring site. Worse-case scenario was that they had blatantly plagerised your site – copied everything as their own. Not so bad is that someone has found an interesting pic on your site and linked directly to it on another site to tell people about it, but not necessarily atrributed your site to it.

Hot-linking files between sites is considered bad nettiqette if you have not got permission from the site owner. Image copyright issues aside, it is preferred that if you have an interest in an image that you download a copy and host it yourself, or that you link to the hosting website itself so that people can see proper attribution.

This has already happened to me a few times with the most notable being some Korean blogger’s site blatantly copying word for word one of my articles, but he decided to leave all the images in it hot-linking to my server. I couldn’t believe it, but I knew it wouldn’t be long before someone did that. I dropped a politely worded, but firm, message on his blog where everyone could see it, and he has since deleted the plagerised entry from his blog.

So, how do we go about preventing your Apache web server from serving up images to invalid referrers? Read on…

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