Sorry to say that the Dutch words you picked are rather tame and will probably be interpreted as the poster having some fun with his avatar. Something a bit more radical such as goatse may score more effect ;)

Thanks,

I will take your words under advice.
I simply used an online translation engine for that one.
On the other hand you have to walk the fine line between funny and too much.
After all, upsetting a large community such as his is not always wise
Nevertheless, I will see what I can do in my next issue.
It is never too late and I get tons of my pix linked.

Some of the worst bozos are MySpace users. I think in my next issue I will have a little MySpace fun.

Lol I hate hotlinkers, good stuff dude!

If you're interested. The dutch translation of "Ich bin ein mieser kleiner Bilderdieb" is: "Ik ben een miezerige kleine fotodief".

There was a comment cautioning me about something. Somehow I didn't read through and accidentally deleted it.
Just wanted to acknowledge that it wasn't intentional.

changing the image to goatse is funnier and far more timeless.

Hehehe... Good Job!!!...

I'll have to remember that trick, thanks for posting it...
I know some guys over at G4 that do that once in awhile...

Yeah once a month a check my stats for sites linking in to me etc, I've got lots using my stuff as backgrounds etc,m especially on MySpace, I've actually had sites using my work as LOGOS for their site... I changed the linked pcitures to point to one that I made that has a white background with bold red letters that says "I'm a thief, I stole this image from DragonSteelMods.com" it's really funny to see it tiled as someone background on my scape and such, and seeing that sites logo was cool too!

I hate people that hate hotlinkers. Rather try to be innovative instead of doing such boring stuff.

BTW: You are welcome to hotlink all content from my site!

Nice stuff, why don't you link to lemonparty.org or tubgirl.com instead?

Lol this is great :-D You should put porn in the pictures instead, though. That would have serious effects. I'd love to hear people's responses on forums as members use pornographic avatars :-P

Instead of changing your file names, you can also use htaccess to re route requests for your jpgs to 'an image of your choice'. As you can imagine, this leaves a lot of room for creative freedom. In my case, most of the hotlinkers were from myspace. So I created a big black background gif that flashed black and white endlessly. It basically makes any page impossible to read. You can view the image and check out the htaccess method of stopping hotlinking that I used here.

Thanks for sharing your story!

hahaha, this is great. I look forward to more :)

LOL That's good stuff. I can't wait for next month's edition. :D

How do you know if someone is hotlinking your page?

Wish you would comment more on how you did it. I got it currently to allow hotlinking from my site and craigslist, but I would love to change the pic!

Uwe: I'd be glad to hotlink your large images on some high traffic forum (maybe digitalpoint and sitepoint) as my avatar. Lets see your traffic jump by 5GB/day or more without getting visitors. I am not sure you'd still be happy to pay for it. I am sure if you see several GB/day you would think different.

Maxpower: I am using .htaccess files. I don't rename my files. This would be bad for Google Image search and a whole lot of other things.
Maybe I should rename this section "Designing Websites with Redirects".

Maiku, Max: Thanks. I am glad you like it.

cwebb, Se[BBB]e: My url still shows on the site linking to mine. I don't want to be affiliated with such imagery in any way. I don't want to be nasty either. I am just having a little fun every now and then with my logfiles and I thought some readers may enjoy this too.

Zane: Go to AWStats, under "Links from an External Page" click on "Full list". Then scroll down to the links that have no page views. Those are your hotlinkers. Then download the logfile and search for the referer to see the exact url.
It's quite amazing how many people do this.
AWStats is supported by most webhosts. Just ask them.
Next week I am going to show how to rewrite some Blogs I guess.

Thanks for all your comments!

cpanel offers some pretty neat options to make people unable to hotlink.

Anyway, if you got some sparetime I agree this can be lots of fun! ;)

cheers.

p.s. if you even need some words in spanish for another hotlinker, just drop me a line! ;)

-will.

It would've been better if you provided instructions as to how to edit the .htaccess files for this.

Allright here is how to do it. It's on just about every site that talks about hotlinking anyways:
You need a webserver running apache. If site1.com links your image you create a file .htaccess and put it where the image is. In this file you write something like:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www\.)?site1.com [NC]
RewriteRule \.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ /pathtogif/newpic.gif [L]

This will now reroute every request to pictures from this site to newpic.gif. You can do more than just one site by repeating line2 or line2 and line3 if you want to tailor to them. The [L] should be only on the last RewriteRule.
The RewrietCond can be more complex (it's all regular expressions).

My brother was telling me about doing this, its funny to actually see it though, thanks for the laugh.

Amazing. I have gotten nearly 6k visitors from Digg during the last two hours. Thanks to everyone who liked this little thing so much. In case the search is not working for you: I have set it up so that when this site comes under heavy load it won't work, since search burns a lot of MySQL queries. Hopefully this is understandable. Andre (my other site: Travel Guides and Forum

lol @ Arizona

Personally I would change their stolen image to "I'm a cheap image thief and I have a small penis". Can't wait for your next "fix". Thanks for the chuckle ! Pottsc

Allright. Thanks everyone. It was a real rush to see over 7k people flock here to read this in two hours.

I have read all your comments and I will do my best to accomodate them in the next issue. Since it will be about MySpace users, I have no problem being a little nasty.

You rock! Even though I put up photobucket links, Myspace users hotlink my stuff all the time. I'm thinking of swapping the stolen image with a picture of THEM with the text that announces, "I am gay." That should get the goobers to stop! :)

The greatest number of offenders at my site come from Xanga. A couple of my images were used in skins that a lot of people are using. I replaced one, an image of cherries (that for some reason a lot of teen girls seem to want on their pages), with the animated hamsters from the old "hamsterdance" site. I noticed a while later one of the offenders had a post saying DOES ANYONE KNOW WHERE ALL THESE HAMSTERS CAME FROM?!

image of cherries (that for some reason a lot of teen girls seem to want on their pages)

OMG. This is hilarious. I am cracking up. Thanks for sharing.

Just a tip. Why not first set the image to expire after a few years. Then after a few day put up a redirect. That way the offending person won't notice for quite a while that something is wrong. Even better. Check the logs to find the IP adres of the offender(most likely the first one hotlinking your image or that IP that requests the image the most times). Then exclude that IP from the redirect. That way the fun will last a lot longer :-)

When i was visiting a forum i come every once in a while i noticed that the avatar i had picked from some guys site was changed to some Dutch words, which where so offensive it brought tears to my eyes. I decided to see where the picture was hosted and guess what, i've stumbled across a real internet pirate bounty hunter. My god, you're a true internet genius! Man, you've got me down on my knees and you're whooping me big time! Everyone at the forum hates me now, saying that i am an idiot because my avatar says so. But you're right, i didn't give you any credit for this website, therefor i shall apologise on the forum where i've been using this avatar, and show them some hi res pictures of the photographic genuis that was the man behind my avatar. Anyways, get used to changing you're picture's adresses because from now on, all my avatars will be hi res wallpapers from this site. With love, Han.

Ha ha, you are a funny man! Why not take a shot at this Dutch forummer again, it seems he has taken another one of your pictures as an avatar on the same board, here's your second chance to show him and his stupid posts you càn be creative. Show him you're in control over your website! See how much of your absolute internet webmaster terror power he can handle! See what hurts more, you making him look like a total idiot in front of his buddies (bet theyre all laughing and pointing at him now that he's gotten such a ridiculous avatar, the big one cropped into 80x80 reso didnt seem to make sense anyway) or the big fat bill landing on your doormat at the end of the month.

This Dutch Dude is even more stupid than I thought. Hilarious. Obviously you have no clue how redirects work. Excellent ! I will certainly educate you.

BTW: I can see from your IP address, that you wrote the last two posts under different synonyms. Thanks for inviting me over again. Oh yeah, don't overestimate the power of your forum. It does not create THAT much traffic. It is the combined forces of thousands of people hotlinking, not you alone. Maybe I gave you too much credit for it.
So enjoy the picture while it lasts. Since you invited me over again, I will take the opportunity to realize some of the suggestions by other readers.

Well, thanks Dutch Dude for playing along so nicely and for giving me the chance to educate others on your example. Also thank you for inviting me to do this with your second post. I will keep your IP records as proof that you wrote both posts.

Really, i do know how redirects work, that's why i'm saying give it another shot! But please dont try to copy someone elses idea and be original for a change. Porn and written words of how stupid i am have been way overdone. Come to realise it, these jokes have been pulled for ages. You're free to have "my" ip address, i really don't care. In fact it might change every once in a while so if you want to keep track of it just send out a ping to proxy.ams.chello.nl and you'll have it. And yes, you gave you too much credit for doing this. That's what i'm trying to point out, you suck at this. I think you should stick to photography, you're a great photographer. That's the reason i took your picture as my avatar (cropping it into 80x80 was pretty funny imo.). If i had hosted the picture myself no one would know who'd made it because it would be at my server. Not that i was thinking about that at the time i "did it". Show me who's stupid here and try to change this thread into something we haven't seen before. Yours? AnonymousHotlinkerT Hotlinker Han Hanski But i bet you knew that from the looks of my ip address, didn't you?

Hello Hanski,

looking at your IP revealed that you wrote both the entries. Otherwise it is useless thats true. All I need it for is to keep track of what you wrote.
You seem to be a somewhat reasonable person after all. Maybe we can argue about this via email? Why don't you email me (use the contact button above).
If you read through my comments above, there I have explained a little about redirects and I have also explained why I didn't do the nasty things that people suggested.

Your avatar gets seen aroun 150 times a day. An average wallpaper is 500kB. That is 2.25 GB of traffic a month. If there are just 50 people doing the same thing I have to pay for 112.5 GB of traffic for nothing (meaning I don't see a single visitor since noone bothers to find out where an avatar comes from).
Here is how it could have been done:
You ask me upfront for my permission. I would have made an avatar picture that fits your 80x80 size and is no bigger than 5kB (thats 22.5 MB instead of 2.25 GB). You would have provided a link to this website and we both would have been happy.
Instead you chose not to ask and to burden me with 2.25 GB of traffic from your little picture. You didn't even bother to find out if the pictures are copyrighted. Thus you simply ignored all the implications of your actions. Not only did you violate my copyright, but along the way you made me pay for it (traffic).

Here is an example of what I do to Hot-Linkers: <removed by Andre>. You can't miss it!

Mike, I can completely understand your outrage. Unfortunately I had to remove the url (too graphic), but I kept the url to your website.