I used to think “no one is going to hotlink off me, my stuff is so esoteric, no need to think about it” but somehow people find my stuff and then hotlink the hell out of it. Myspace is quite bad for that, 13 year old girls posing as 18 year olds and 40 year old guys posing as 13 year olds post lots of stuff, ripping off other sites. As long as the drain is minimal, I don’t mind so much, but for me, if I want to share something, I’ll upload a copy of it, since hotlinking is mean.

Finally tracked down this one guy who was hurting me a bit, by linking one of my damn movies from the junk directory. I wasn’t sure where it was coming from exactly since the referal page never had it, but I kept getting reports from this referer that it was being linked.

I finally found it, on a sub page, and I never spotted it before since it’s a bunch of pictures, and a bunch were broken. So I viewed the source and searched for my domain. The guy freakin linked an mpg in an IMG tag, so it was always broken, but it still touched my server for the bandwidth.

I changed the name of the file (it was the locker animation I had done for my brother’s business way back), it was called fulllocker.mpg, now it’s full_locker.mpg. I decided to see if I could do something else with that, cause now I get 404 errors reported from this hotlink, so I decided to fill it in with an image file, renamed to fulllocker.mpg. Fun stuff.

The obligatory links:
What he wanted, the movie file (for fun)
What he gets, the image file (renamed back to gif for this post so you don’t need to mess with the browser settings, but referenced in an IMG tag this works fine as .mpg extension)