rotormouth
Senior Heliman
Location: Irvine, California
| blocking their IP address(es)Which IPs are you blocking? I assume they (daum.net) have linked your images in their HTML code which, when displayed in a browser's window, pulls images from your server.
By blocking the IP addresses you gathered from your logs you are blocking the hapless users of their site from viewing your images. That's bad. First, it's bad because you cannot block everyone's IP address... if you do that, you might as well shut down your servers... pull the plug. Second, what if these users were also avid users/lurkers of your site? Not any more, if you are blocking them.
Those free home-site services have already experienced and fixed your same dilemma; although, they took it to the extreme.
To keep dumb developers from stealing your bandwidth, you need to verify the referrer portion of the request when a user requests an image linked from 'that' web site's page.
You know PHP? With Apache mod_rewrite and a little PHP code, you can verify the referrer and, if the referrer contains daum.net (or anything you want) the user is redirected to a default image or page. You can take it to the extreme too and block all images not directly linked on your site. Or, just block the major offenders.
Server resources required for this should be minimal.
If you got this problem fixed or I am totally in left field, please shoot me now.  |
