Help! Sucking bandwidth

[fade]

Hey,

I have a vbulletin forum and I was checking my site stats and noticed that someone is hotlinking an avatar from my forum. It's another site's forum where the user is hotlinking the avatar to use in their own profile. How do I prevent this?

I currently have my htaccess file setup so that nothing can be hotlinked from my site, but it won't work for my forum. I have this:

===========
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://mysite.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.mysite.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://mysite.com/forums/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.mysite.com/forums/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(gif|GIF|jpg|JPG|rm|RM|ram|RAM)$ - [F]
===========

It works for my site, but not for the forums. Can anyone offer any suggestions?

Thanks.

[empty]

You should just be able to drop that into your vB's avatar directory and be good to go. It's what I do (though not on a Jag server)

[CeleronXL]

vB doesn't have an avatar directory. They're all stored in the MySQL database. Tell this user to stop. If they don't, delete the avatar, it's that simple.

What forum software is the forum that it's being leeched to running? Most forums these days upload the avatar to their own server automatically.

[fade]

Hey, VB does store the avatars in the database. The site that this loser is on is using UBB. The weird thing is the avatar being used is not from the member that has it on my site. I asked if it was him and he said no he doesn't post on many other forums (I know he's not lying, he's a cool guy). So I don't know how I can stop this person on this other site to stop.

I guess I could email that site's webmaster but I don't know if that will do the trick. What's to stop someone else from doing that later on?

Thanks for the suggestions though.

[jason]

vB uses avatar.php to display the avatar. There are two things that you could try to stop this:

1.) Put the mod_rewrite code you posted above in a .htaccess file in your forum directory, but change the rewriterule part to avatar.php instead of all of the stuff you have there now. I'm not sure if this will work, it may require a little more hacking, but its worth a try.

or

2.) Hack the avatar.php file to check the referer and only display the image if its being requested by another script on your forum.

I'd recommend trying #1 first.

--Jason