Noticing that someone was hotlinking my image(s) I enabled hotlink protection.
But then noticed ,that cached pages by Google/Yahoo, etc, were disconnected from the images, which I don’t want to play around with.
It seems very impractical to try and list each possible site that may want to cache the pages via
cpanel’s "URLs to allow access::"
What is a better way of doing this?
I suppose I would get in trouble for this, but if there weren’t too many images involved, I’d rename the images on my own site and put something offensive in their place (or maybe just a black image or something).
Actually there is quite a few images. And surely quite a few directories that cache images, like the home page and more.
I gather you can prevent hotlinking via a .htaccess rule, such as
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\\.)?YourSite\\.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule \\.(gif|jpg)$ - [F]
as mentioned here: http://www.buildwebsite4u.com/advanced/htaccess-file.shtml
Yes but here again, this shuts out cached big-directory images.