Stealing Bandwidth?

I hope not. I've been looking at my referral logs lately and I've been seeing referrers from myspace.com, otib.co.uk, and a bunch of other sites that really have no reason linking to me.

At first I was flattered, "People must really like my site to be linking to it", I thought. Then I got smart and questioned if they were linking to my images from their site. Well, since most of the referring pages were something like http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm I really didn't know *what* actual page it was because index.cfm is probably thousands of pages.

One referrer was so kind to leave their complete URL for me =) See below.

Thanks to the power of google I came across this site, http://www.uk-dave.com/bytes/misc/referer-check.php, which explains how you can put a little code in your .htaccess file to block (or embarass) bandwidth robbers.


SetEnvIf REFERER "www.mydomain.com" linked_from_here
<FilesMatch ".(gif|jpg|jpeg|png)">
Order deny,allow
Deny from all
Allow from env=linked_from_here
ErrorDocument 403 /stolen.jpg
</FilesMatch>
<Files "stolen.jpg">
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Files>

Here is my image:

You can see the image in action on 4 sites at the time of this posting: