[openmind]

Yesterday evening I received a rather odd telephone call regarding A1 and an insinuated attempt to gain access into the callers site. Now needless to say that's quite a strong accusation to level at anyone needless someone in my position running the business I do but I digress...

I thought it would be handy to give some kind of explanation to any site owner that sees the A1 dedicated server IP address popping up in their server logs or active users. In this particular case the issue was caused by a post on A1 containing a smilie image copied from another forum.

This basically led to the A1 server IP of 78.129.199.111 or IS-4177.a1businessforums.net popping up in their sever logs and masquerading itself as a user when in fact it was because the smilie image was being drawn into their site and rightly announcing itself as a hit on the server. This benign act is known as hot linking.

So what is hot linking?
Well hot linking or inline linking is when content from another site is either accidentally or deliberately linked to from a post or static page. Very rarely is there any malice intended, often the user is linking to publically available images or may have inadvertently linked to an image. You can read a more detailed write up on the practice on this Wikipedia article.

So what should you do if you see our IP address or server name in your logs?
First of all you should attempt to find out what is causing the hit. If you are unable to just contact us with as much detail as possible so we can track down the offending link. Then, if you request us to do so, we can remove the image or link from posts on the forum.

So there you go, a simple but effective alternative to panicking

[Indizine]

That was very good of you to kindly explain Phil - very polite and professional and nothing less that I would ever expect from someone in your position.

[nass]

Warning. Geek humour:

I always rather enjoy messing with .htaccess with site webmasters who deliberately hotlink and use my images directly on other sites. It's rather entertaining to see your telephone number and an ad being displayed there instead smack bang in the middle of their plagiarised content

[Kent Tiger]

Originally Posted by nass

Warning. Geek humour:

Yes, I've heard of people using Imagemagick to invert all hot-linked images, or adding a "Stolen from ...." watermark.

[openmind]

Aye it can be quite entertaining