Fun With Hot Linking

There is a term out there known to webmasters as "hot linking", "inline linking", "leeching", "direct linking", etc. where site will directly link to images on your own sites. The problem with this is that the server in which the image resides may be giving up lots of bandwidth without having any real visitors.

I've seen various methods to deny access to images. Honestly, it has never really bothered me so I've never done anything about it.

This morning though, I was checking my stats on one of my sites and noticed that one of my images was showing up in a lot of eBay listings. eBay is a lot more popular than your run of the mill blog. I was thinking that maybe I should block this image.

Then I got an idea. Why not have more fun with this? As long as they are linking to me, I can change the image! :)

My initial thought was I could just replace the image then update my blog entry to point to wherever I moved the old image to. That sounded like too much work and not enough fun.

So this was my plan. Why not sabotage those that are leeching my images? The fun part still sounded fun, but I didn't want to update my blog, that was the boring part. I decided to make it more dynamic. So here is what I did.

I wrote this PHP script that will determine whether the image was linked from my site, or another based on the HTTP_REFERER. Based on who is linking will determine which image I display.

if (strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'], "latterdayblog.com")) {
    $file = "wp-content/images/little_people_nativity.jpg";
} else {
    $file = "little_people_nativity.jpg";
}
$fp = fopen($file, 'r');
$buffer = fread($fp, filesize($file));
fclose($fp);
header('Content-Type: image/jpeg');
echo $buffer;

Then I added this mod_rewrite line to my .htaccess file:

RewriteRule wp-content/images/little_people_nativity.jpg lp.php

So basically what this does is when the image is requested, instead of the web server just dishing out the image, it goes to my lp.php script which checks the referrer. If the referrer address is my site, then it will display the image expected, if not, it will display this other image I created.

What is the other image I created? I had lots of ideas. Basically they are selling a Fisher-Price Little People Nativity set. So what I did was set up a plain boring eBay affiliate page that list all the latest auctions for this product and wrote a message on the image to visit that page.

The results are thus, before:

And after:

And my blog images still work fine! :D