People are hotlinking to pictures on my site

[Robin]

I have had an incredible rash of people hotlinking to pictures in the last few days. Has anything changed with the code that is supposed to prevent this? It doesn't seem to be working!

[john]

I'll have our system administrators look into this.

[john]

Our engineers fixed this earlier this afternoon.

[Robin]

http://jenniferlopez.lighthive.com/index.php?post=5035
http://www.habbosoup.net/homepage2.php

Both of these pages have pictures hotlinked to my site...

[john]

[Robin]

John,

Thanks, as always, for the very quick reply.

I do know that images remain in my browser cache, but generally if the link doesn't work properly, I'll see the X if I reload the page, and that isn't happening here. And I do see the habbosoup.net site in my referrer stats, so doesn't that mean the image is loading for others? Or not necessarily?

[john]

I do know that images remain in my browser cache, but generally if the link doesn't work properly, I'll see the X if I reload the page, and that isn't happening here.

I do see the X when I visit the habbosoup.net site... What browser are you using and are you accessing behind any firewall, anti-virus, proxy server, etc.?

And I do see the habbosoup.net site in my referrer stats, so doesn't that mean the image is loading for others? Or not necessarily?

You'll see the habbosoup.net site in your referer summary regardless.

Just FYI, checking referers is how the File Sourcing feature works. When the browser requests an image, it sends a referer along with the request. If you have not enabled sourcing and the referer is blank or your own URL, we'll send the image. If you have not enabled sourcing and the referer is another URL, we don't send the image. Some browsers (Safari) appear not to send referers with image requests, so file sourcing does not work for them. Some proxy servers and firewalls rewrite or remove the referer part of the request, which essentially disables our file sourcing protection. So File Sourcing will never be 100% (after all, HTML was not designed to work this way...), but it can drastically reduce the amount of loads for your content via external web pages.

[Robin]

John, thank you so much for the clarification. I was using Firefox, but just checked it in IE, and you're right that it doesn't load there. I am off to rename the picture in any case...

[john]

Robin, it turns out there was an error in one of our software programs which handles the file sourcing protection, that's why your file was being displayed. Our engineers have isolated the fix and should have this taken care of by tomorrow.

[Robin]

Thanks John!