Protect *Against* Bandwidth Leeching (Part II)
Last week we spoke about how to prevent Spam blogs for ripping your content and killing your bandwidth bill. This week how to prevent image ripping.
Normally if you run a website that doesn’t have a news feed it is really easy to block people from stealing your images by using tweaking your .htaccess file with a referrer requirement. BUT if your site has a news feed that tick won’t work.
The Hotlink Protection Plugin for WordPress Referrer checks every request for an image that is made to your site. If the referrer empty or not from your your blog the request is redirected to an information image or the image is blocked.
To ensure that feed readers see images the image urls in the feed are replaced by an alternate ‘secret’ URL. This secret URL is not protected by a referrer check so online feedreaders get the image, and since you implemented my tip from last week you don’t have to worry about spam blogs getting the secret link.
