For the last few days I’ve been battling a site that had hotlinked to the picture of the Ohio License plate on this site. It was a site of oxymoron photos- I guess the words “beautiful Ohio” and that plate design make people laugh.
The hotlink was running bandwidth up- and making stats mean nothing (just remember when you see the Dayton Daily News bragging about visitors to their lame site). When I enabled “Hotlink protection” it broke the pretty URL structure by taking a line out of our .htaccess file. Even shutting off the “hotlink protection” didn’t replace that line of code- so the site regained some functionality- but not all.
I’ve had my head somewhere else, and didn’t investigate it fully- so a lot of you couldn’t click through to posts, or comment. It’s fixed now. I’d really like you to take a look at the post about the “Middle Class Task Force” and my thoughts.
Sorry for the inconvenience. I’ll try to get back on our normal posting schedule. Thanks.
The classic way to deal with hotlinkers, aside from .htacess editing, which you tried, is to change your source file for the OPLATES photo, at which point you can change the file they hotlinked to be whatever enormous, grotesque photo you choose. Roger Cockerham at cockeyed.com (dunno if his site is still up so i’m not going to link to it) did that to brilliant effect back in the good old bad old days of the internet.