VisoHotlink 0.9

Visohotlink 0.9

Hotlinking is very common on the web by now and is not very easy to detect. A lot of people often use your pictures in their blog, wiki, forum and sometimes homepage. They just paste the url of your file in there html source. And they don't ask for it. It can be damaging for your website since it uses your bandwith. 

But you can also take advantages of hotlinking. For exemple, if a blogger shows one of your picture in its last article, you could ask him for a link. And then, you makes more visits and you also improve your SEO.

Instead of prohibit hotlinking, it's more usefull to examine each hotlink and decide of an appropriate answer.

VisoHotlink is a php/MySQL script that helps you to detect and manage hotlink of your pictures. Here is now the 0.9 release. Its main features are :

•  Detection of hotlink using .htaccess file.
•  For each hotlink, you can choose to send the picture, send another picture or send nothing.
• To classify hotlinks, you can choose beween several types.
• Global and individual statistics (downloads number, bandwidth used) for each hotlink. 
• Multilanguage (english and french only available by now but you are welcome to send be translations in your own language!)
• Easy administration.
• List of referer to ignore.
  

In order to work, VisoHotlink needs the followings :

• Php4
• MySQL4
• Mod_rewrite activated