Hi, I noticed that some other ppl already mention this but there weren't any solutions. The issue I have at hand is that I am trying to enable the hotlink protection feature in CPanel. I added a couple extentions that I would like to be protected from hotlinking into the "extentions to allow" field and also my domain into the list of "urls to allow" field but when I tried to link to it from a page on my site, it just redirects to the "url to redirect to" link that I specified. Please help!

There is already a topic here about it.

Thx for the link but that topic wasn't answered as well. maybe I should rephrase it: I can't even link to the files that I enabled "hotlinking" for even from the domains I added to the list. It either blocks everything or nothing.

Make sure that the URL is entered both with and without the "www" at the beginning. That's the best advice I can give without seeing how you have it configured.

I did that as well but it still wouldn't work...

This sounds like the same problem in the other thread. I would suggest making and uploading an .htaccess file. It's described in the other thread, but of course change the domain name to your own.

I tried it and I can finally link to the files from my site but when I tried hotlinking to a file from another one of my sites, it still works.... Is it possible to configure it so that only the domains that I specified will be able to link to the files?

I notcied that the first time I tried the .htaccess file as well. My images were still displayed on other people's sites. I believe it's because the image is already stored in your browser's cache memory. Try erasing your cache or Temporary Internet Files or whatever your browser calls them and them reload the site which is hotlinking.

that's not it either since I am trying to protect zipped files...

Well then we're getting to the root of the problem. You can't "hotlink" a zipped file, only one which displays in the browser, like an image or HTML file. What you're referring to is someone using a regular link from their site directly to your ZIP file, rather than linking to the main site, yes? Like this:

HEY CLICK THIS LINK FOR A ZIP FILE!

There are workarounds for this, I know it can be done in javascript that when someone goes to any page other than your main page from another site that they'll automatically be redirected to the main page. That won't work for every browser though. The fact is that unless you're out to simply stop a specific site from linking to your pages (which you can ban referrals from specific IPs or domains), there's no really effective way to stop it, short of putting all the files in a password protected directory.

Oh..thanks