cip:

For me it depends on the nature of the site. As it was the case until now there were only blogs hot linking, illustrating an idea or poem, or something else... didn't really bothered me.

Well... if it would have been a splog I might have thought about it, but usually they are not interested in images.

ThinkandDrive:

Personally, I replace whatever image they're linking to with some hardcore pornography. But then again, I'm pretty immature that way.

Kit:

It's not so easy to decide on because some of them do credit me as the author—yet still, they're using my server and my bandwidth.

iancu:

Heheh, since I don't have that much hotlinking, I usually rename the images on my server :) It would be a drag though if I had to do it more often than once a week or so..

Kit:

If you have (S)FTP or SSH access to your server you can prevent hotlinking by adding to the .htaccess file the following code (changing "yoursite.com" and "friendlysite.com", of course):

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?yoursite.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?friendlysite.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg|png|js|css)$ - [F]

My dilemma, though, is about if, not about how.

adip:

If copyright is a concern, this is a good technique: http://powazek.com/posts/882

Kit:

Hmm, that's interesting...

Monoscope:

I recently had to deal with this problem, monoscope was getting pounded with hot-links, at one point they made up almost 40% of my bandwidth. A first I didn't mind, then I started asking the really high trafficers to repost the image on their site or take it down, this worked great until I started getting some really snarky replies so I did the .htaccess thing, but that caused all kinds of problems with web based rss feeds. In the end I found out how to add exceptions for the web based RSS and it's been pretty good ever since.

Here is my code:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?monoscope\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !google\. [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !search\?q=cache [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !msn\. [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !yahoo\. [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !netvibes\. [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !bloglines\. [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png|jpg)$ /images/nohotlink.jpe [L]

The image I created for the hot-link was a little bit of a slam on hot-linking and a banner for my site.

http://www.monoscope.com/images/nohotlink.jpe

I hope this helps
//monoscope

Kit:

Yeah, this debuts slowly and then it turns into a nightmare.

I noticed the problems with the web based RSS readers and figured out the same solution.

Thank you a lot!