Be Excellent To Each Other

Hi popples,

Someone asked me on one of the boards I manage a moment ago if there was a way of finding out who was hot-linking your images. Now, I know there is, but I have forgotten. I think I used to check mine through CPanel back in the early days of World of Monkey, but now I have forgotticised. Please to be re-knowledging me.

not sure myself but a google search turns up The referer [sic] header will tell you which web page is linking to your image. Download a raw log file, look for hits on your image, and you should see the URL which links to your page in the referer field.

Am sure there must be a better way though.

Myspace? that's just soooo 2005.

If your friend uses any sort of web stats system, which is usually found as an option within the hosting service's control panel, then I expect they will be able to view a break down of the top 50 or so links in to their site and also a list of the top referrers. Hopefully the offender will be in that list.

If they do have a control panel they should also be able to disable hot linking or send a naughty 'up yours' image instead of the image that is being linked to.

Excellent. Thanks guys!

Hugh, now you say that it makes total sense, as I remember checking my own hotlinking 'problem' years ago, and that would have been before Google Analytics, and the only stats I would have had would have been the CPanel stats.

The person asking doesn't necessarily know if she has suffered any hotlinking, she just happened to ask what it was and why people didn't like it and when I explained asked if there was a way of seeing if her images had been hotlinked.