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Thief Stealing My Images - Help Please

by Hunter06
15 replies
I would really appreciate some help with this little problem I'm having. An ex-employee has set up an identical portal site to mine and is not only stealing my clients but has also directly copied ads that I've created for my clients and put them on his listing pages. The idiot has failed to remove the links to the images hosted on my server so I'm now serving images to his visitors. As you can imagine I'm pretty p@#%% about it.

Can anyone here help me with a solution to prevent his site from accessing my server. I'm a copywriter with some design skills and I know how to set up sites etc but this is a little over my head. I've searched for an answer but have got bogged down in very technical htaccess issues etc so a simple solution would be great.

Thanks in advance for any help offered.

John
#images #stealing #thief
  • Profile picture of the author jmidas
    I wouldn't worry about how to change your images or apply it to your site.

    I'd just get a baseball bat and apply it to his head.
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    • Profile picture of the author Hunter06
      Yip, at 6'2'' and 220 pounds I'm not a shrinking violet in that department but my lawyers reckon it's better to hurt him in the pocket.
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  • Profile picture of the author BizBooks
    change your image links and put in place of the old image a new image with teh same name but that says your URL instead of the graphic that is supposed to be there..

    or how about saying "i'm a thief" in the graphic- it will how up whenever someone visits his page
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    • Profile picture of the author Hunter06
      My wife reckons some porn would look good to his(my) clients. Something with animals and some nice inanimate objects I think.
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      • Profile picture of the author jmidas
        I like your wife's thinking. I would like to see the look on his face when he sees those pics.
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        • Profile picture of the author Hunter06
          hey jmidas, It has always been my contention that what goes around, comes around. I'll probably just put up a "thief" image and leave at that, but first I'm just going to finish collecting evidence of his misdeeds.
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          • Profile picture of the author Christian Sawyer
            If you use Cpanel, there is a Hotlink Protection option to only allow listed domains to load your images.

            All associated domains/subdomains are automatically listed, all you need to do is Enable it.

            Hope this helps!

            -Christian
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            • Profile picture of the author Hunter06
              Originally Posted by Christian Sawyer View Post

              If you use Cpanel, there is a Hotlink Protection option to only allow listed domains to load your images.

              All associated domains/subdomains are automatically listed, all you need to do is Enable it.

              Hope this helps!

              -Christian
              Thanks, I'll check it out.

              John
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  • Profile picture of the author Bruce Hearder
    Why don't you try a trick that I use on my main blog that stop this from happening..

    Try this :

    Make a .htaccess file and put it in the same folder as the one that holds all the images he is hotlinking from you..

    This is the file I use :

    RewriteEngine on
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?mysite.com(/)?.*$ [NC]
    RewriteRule .*\.(gif|jpg|jpeg|bmp)$ http://www.mysite.com/stolen.jpe] [R,NC]

    Now make an image, using MS PaintBrush or Photoshop (what every you are confitable with) that contains nothing but text that says something like
    "This image blatantly stolen from MySite.COM"

    Save the file as stolen.jpe (note its jpe, not jpg)

    Upload to your servers image folder and sit back and wait..

    What will happen is that everytime someone calls one of your images from a domain other than mysite.com, it will display the stolen.jpe file instead of the real image..

    He will quickly get the message..

    Hope this helps

    Bruce
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    • Profile picture of the author Hunter06
      Thanks Bruce,

      This is exactly what I was trying to achieve but the technicalities got the better of me. This is simple enough for me to implement without my head exploding. Thanks a stack!
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      • Profile picture of the author jmidas
        Great idea from Bruce and Christian. Hunter, let us know how it works.
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    • Profile picture of the author businessmentor
      The replacement image can say "Visit mysitename.com to see this image". That will be better - you will get his traffic.
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  • Profile picture of the author harrisunderwork
    Hot link protecting form cpanel, thats the best option.
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  • Profile picture of the author david-forer
    Just curious about the hot linking
    if you have a squidoo page and link to your photo on your website can it no longer pull up the image?
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    Ain't selling anything so.....
    Denver Reputation Marketing
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    • Profile picture of the author Bruce Hearder
      Originally Posted by david-forer View Post

      Just curious about the hot linking
      if you have a squidoo page and link to your photo on your website can it no longer pull up the image?
      As it stands it wont work..
      But you could change the script so that your len's utrl could request the image ok, and everything else get the error image..

      Hope that helps

      Bruce
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