Dude! They're stealing from my website!
15 02 09 - 01:42 I noticed that there were a number of hits against Sherry's website that didn't appear to go through the html for that page. Sherry has a number of music pages, where she makes an image that shows how she feels about a song, and a low quality mp3 of the song to give the atmosphere. She recommends that anyone interested in the songs should purchase a copy, and the low fidelity of the MP3's prevent anyone from being too interested in them. Or so we thought...It turned out that there are a number of 'music player' sites that have linked directly to the mp3s, circumventing Sherry's pages altogether. I find this annoying and unethical in the extreme. They are stealing my bandwidth to sell their ads.
Please go to this hotlink protection tuturial, they gave the most coherent description of the solution that I've found so far. They also offer a link to a test page, where you can verify whether you have set up the protection properly. There's also some concern about the interaction with Internet Explorer 6, which has any number of peculiarities. Please see this page which describes the most compliant way to manage that situation.
I've had it set up for about 10 minutes, and it's already stopped 10 people from using those songs. And it kind of worries me, that those playlist sites offer up these low quality songs in the first place, they must have googled for the songs, and they don't care about the fidelity, just the existence.
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