Images not showing after setting up Hotlink Protection

[kotaro535]

Hey guys, I'm having trouble regarding my website.


After setting up hotlink protection I noticed that all of my images are not showing up.

Here you can visit my website here.

Anyone knows how to fix this?

[Vin DSL]

Hey guys, I'm having trouble regarding my website.


After setting up hotlink protection I noticed that all of my images are not showing up.

Here you can visit my website here.

Anyone knows how to fix this?

Well...

I don't mean to be a wiseguy - really - but, you didn't furnish much info.

On face value, if enabling hotlink protection is causing problems, disabling hotlink protection should fix the problems, no?

If you can be more specific, such as: what you're trying to accomplish, how you setup your hotlink protection, what the undesired effect has been, et cetera, maybe someone can walk you through it...

Interesting server stats, you got there, BTW!

[kotaro535]

Uh. Thanks btw.

I have solved the problem now.

I just deleted .htaccess and everything went back to normal

[JPC-Sabrina]

Simple solutions are sometimes the best place to start. It is good to hear that your issue is resolved. Vin DSL thanks for pointing out that when users post to forums with issues it is helpful to provide as much information as possible. That way it is easier to pinpoint and trouble shoot the problem more quickly.

[gohighvoltage]

kotaro535.

HotLink protection can be tricky. You say that you deleted the htaccess file. Are you sure that it was not needed for your website/forum? Typically htaccess houses some pretty important stuff, such as rewrites, etc.

Do you have a dedicated directory for images?

I see all your images are located in:
Index of /temp_files/images

The first thing you need to do is create an htaccess file in your images directory. Inside the htaccess file you need to have:

Options -Indexes

What this does is prevent people from seeing all your images in the directory. This is important.

Then in your same image directory, you need to create a robots.txt file and have in it:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

this keeps the "HONEST" web crawlers from indexing your images.


As far as the actual hotlink protection, this can be done, but like VIN DSL said, we would need more information, and it can be tricky.

Hotlinking protection works fine, where most people have trouble is if they use sub-domains, or other forwarded domains.

Let me know, I would be glad to help ya.

[thecoalman]

Then in your same image directory, you need to create a robots.txt file and have in it:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

That won't prevent a bot from crawling that directory. robots.txt has to be in the top level directory for your domain (example.com/robots.txt), in robots.txt you would specify what directories you don't want crawled.

User-agent: * 
Disallow: /somedirectory/
Disallow: /anotherdir/

There is a lot more options than that like wildcards, different rules for different user agents etc.

On a final note using this:

User-agent: * 
Disallow: /

Will tell all bots not to index anything at all on your site.

[Ron]

Excellent post thecoalman. It's always wonderful to see such helpful posts from smart detail oriented people like you.

[gohighvoltage]

That won't prevent a bot from crawling that directory. robots.txt has to be in the top level directory for your domain (example.com/robots.txt), in robots.txt you would specify what directories you don't want crawled.

User-agent: * 
Disallow: /somedirectory/
Disallow: /anotherdir/

There is a lot more options than that like wildcards, different rules for different user agents etc.

On a final note using this:

User-agent: * 
Disallow: /

Will tell all bots not to index anything at all on your site.

Great Followup thecoalman. You are correct, I should of noted it should be in the main directory. Thanks for correcting that.


So in your main directory, you want to create a robots.txt
and have in it:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /temp_files/images/