Stuart Fox wrote:
If you contact me off list I'll see what I can to to help with the hosting of the HTML and *possibly the images.
Email sent off-list - thanks for the offer of possible help.
I'd second the "use thumbnails" suggestion along with some a few other solutions: -
- make use of the HTTP_REFERER variable (not perfect but useful)
I am told he has tried this, but as I haven't seen the code I'm not sure why this wasn't helpful. He also used Javascript hacks but I can't see how they would be helpful. At the end of the day its not easy to protect images on a third party site (but that shouldn't affect his bandwidth on the main site), but if the problem is HTML that's not being cached then no amount of Javascript is going to help.
- store the images out of a public folder then hardlink them when the
correct index page is hit and use a crobjob the clean the hardlinks if the images hasnt been accessed in, say, 10 mins using the +atime bit with find. I've used this method quite successfully many times.
Interesting hack; yes I can see that working quite well.
I need to find out (and have asked but not had reply yet) what he actually considers as "abuse". The reason I know about this site is through another site which links (with permission) to his images.
- possibly use mod_bandwitch with apache (not tried it yet)
- possibly use mod_security with apache (again not tried it yet)
I'll look at mod_bandwidth and mod_security but I think that while they probably go some way to solving the problem I started the thread with, they may not be so relevant the more I come to understand about what the problem really is.