Chinese Hotlinking?

[Buncha]

Here's the problem. I've got dozens of Chinese forums hotlinking some of my fullsize pics. The traffic these sites generate is astounding. It puts sites like The Hun and Worldsex to shame.

Blocking them with htaccess by domain doesn't seem to do much good. A new one pops up every other day with some random domain like 661pp.com or 2kkkk.com.

I can't disable all hotlinking. There are some sites that legit hotlink my stuff (like gallery preview thumbs). And I don't mind when most English forums hotlink, hoping that some surfers will follow it back to the source (and their traffic isn't overwhelming). I do have the fusker and lewww sites blocked. But those Chinese forums are draining my bandwidth.

Anyone have some tips, suggestions or tutorials on how to prevent Chinese hotlinking?

Thanks for the help.

Dave

[pc]

Block them by IP address. Okean
This should be enough.

[HappySpanker]

pclit speaks the truth. you might also google for 'prevent hotlinking' to get a slew of htaccess rewrite rules to prevent it.

there was a guy on here last month asking for china traffic. maybe you can bounce them to him?

[Buncha]

Thanks for the info. I also found these sites which use the Okean IP lists:

http://www.parkansky.com/china.htm
http://www.wizcrafts.net/chinese-blocklist.html

[Mr Spock]

Another way to block is using the htaccess and blocking via language settings - not 100% because the surfers will have to have the language setting set to Chinese.

[Useless]

Rename all of your images and put the words freedom or democracy in the names. That'll stop the little fuckers. They don't want to be dragged in to the local party headquarters for re-education.

[cd34]

Depending on your directory structure:

Create a directory of files that are hotlinkable universally and put

RewriteEngine off

in the .htaccess in that directory

Then, you can protect your main site with rewrite rules:

RewriteEngine on
# leave this line in allow empty referrers, remove to disallow empty referrers
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.*@)?([a-z0-9-]+\.)*yourdomain\.com(:[0-9]+)?(/.*)?$ [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(asf|mpg|mpeg|wmv|avi|rm|gif|jpeg|jpg|zip)$ - [NC,F,L]

replace yourdomain with your domain name.

Blocking domains in your .htaccess like

deny from *.chinesesitename.com

won't do what you need -- and will only slow down page requests because each IP address that hits your site would need to do a reverse lookup. I don't know if that is what you've done, or, if you are putting in mod_rewrite rules to specifically block domains.

You could also do the reverse and do something like:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} (domain1\.com|domain2\.com|domain3\.com) [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F]

which would be a block based on the incoming referrer.

My suggestion would really be to disallow hotlinking except for domains that you want to allow hotlinking for which prevents this sort of thing from happening in the future, and, stops the immediate problem without you having to search through logs or referrers to figure out who is hotlinking.

If you want to allow multiple sites to hotlink, you can put lines like:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.*@)?([a-z0-9-]+\.)*yourdomain\.com(:[0-9]+)?(/.*)?$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.*@)?([a-z0-9-]+\.)*yourseconddomain\.com(:[0-9]+)?(/.*)?$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.*@)?([a-z0-9-]+\.)*yourotherdomain\.com(:[0-9]+)?(/.*)?$ [NC]

You can consolidate that a bit, but, I think that makes the rules a bit confusing to troubleshoot later on.