After browsing the helpful advice in these forums, I was able to get the hotlink protection working. However, it seems the image redirect isn't working.

I found a blog that was hotlinking to one of my images, and when turning on the hotlink protection & reloading the blog, it shows up as a "?" instead of my redirect image.

My htaccess looks like this:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://art.georgecoghill.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://art.georgecoghill.com$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://georgecoghill.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://georgecoghill.com$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://design.georgecoghill.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://design.georgecoghill.com$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://images.georgecoghill.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://images.georgecoghill.com$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.georgecoghill.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.georgecoghill.com$ [NC]

RewriteRule .*\.(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|bmp)$ http://images.georgecoghill.com/banners/pr...nerd_pirate.jpg [R,NC]

Which is similar to an Apache htaccess help file I saw posted here. The difference is that the Apache file said the image redirect file should end with [R,L] and mine reads [R, NC]. I'm not much of a programmer so I don't know the differences.

Any suggestions?

The [R, NC] worked for me... You did the directory thing? What I had to do was set up a folder... In my case I used the "freehotlinking" name so I could keep it straight. So I made a "freehotlinking" folder and then put the htaccess file:




inside that folder with the "You Are Stealing Bandwidth" image and this avatar in there and it worked like a dream. In the "Hotlink protection" thing on cPanel I put the link to that "stealing bandwidth" image in the "freehotlinking" folder as the image to redirect to and it works like a charm!

I don't know if that explains it right, but anyway, one of the other guys helped me with that here in this thread: http://forum.hostony.com/index.php?showtopic=4547

Good luck! I have the worst trouble with people linking directly to my images and videos so I can sympathize. It drives me crazy!

-Bonnie

I am not exactly sure what you did. I just used the Hotlink Protection in the CPanel to do this, so I am not sure about how you set up your specific solution.

Thanks for the help though.