Hotlinking is Stealing! (Continued)
In December 2005, MySpace users stole bandwidth 5081 times by hotlinking to an image file on Martha's Web. Even though the image has long since been removed, Martha's Web still is taking hits from MySpace due to the fact that these users do not have a clue about how to manage a web page and they just keep adding stuff to the top of the page. So every time someone goes to one of these pages, Martha's Web takes another hit on the '404' (Page not found) page. I believe MySpace condones this practice, which is just the same as stealing.
In December Martha's Web was being hosted on a site that allowed unlimited bandwidth, so I was not being charged for all of these calls to an image on my site, but just the idea they were doing it and not caring they were stealing or even knowing they were stealing just infuriated me. I tried finding contact information for the owners/managers of MySpace to let them know this needed to stop. There appears to be no way to contact anyone in authority for MySpace. I went to their Contact Us page and sent detailed information and a request to stop. I got back a silly canned response and never a follow up. I found a couple of email addresses and sent them very detailed information, no answers came back and all these users are still hotlinking to an image on my site. A friend joined MySpace and requested the known offenders to remove the image. A few did remove the image, but most ignored the request. A second request referred the users to a page on my blog explaining about hotlinking, but again, they ignored it. (My blog pages about the hotlinking are listed in the side panel.)
The image was just a little sparkling Christmas wreath, but over 5000 hits a month on the image soon adds up. I have since moved Martha's Web to a host that does not have unlimited bandwidth (But I do have more than I will probably ever use!).
I made a decision to remove most of the images from my site other than screenshots in order to discourage hotlinking in the future. I love my 'eye candy', so this decision was not made lightly. (However some of pages load a lot faster now!)
Still the hits for the no longer available image keep coming, now I was getting a huge number of 404s (Page Not Found). This page generated more bandwidth than the removed image file. An ugly file like I used to discourage Xanga users didn't work, because these users just keep adding stuff to the top of their pages and never see what is located lower on the page.
In desperation I finally decided if I couldn't stop the hotlinking I would at least make it less painful. So I created a new image and uploaded it to my site using the same file name and path.
The new image is here: 
Can't see it? That's because it is very tiny, one pixel by one pixel. When I look at one of the sites that is hotlinking, I have to really look close to find my one pixel file. Once I find it, I right click and select Properties and this is what I see:
Maybe not the best solution, but all I can think of doing now. If you have a better idea, let me know! And just an FYI, .HTAccess didn't work all the time.