possible hotlink solution
 

I'm sure this has been thought of before, I'm interested in comments on how this would affect Joe Surfer, and whether sites such as TGPs would allow it on galleries.

The solution is simple - the HTML content page sets a cookie, and you use htaccess to only serve the image if that cookie is presented. If there is no cookie presented, you can redirect to an image showing the URL of the content page, or asking them to enable cookies...

The catch is that this will affect some surfers who are browsing the HTML page interactively as usual, but for some reason their browser does not accept cookies. However, other solutions such as only allowing ^$ and *mydomainname.com* will also not work for 100% of the surfers.

Would I get blacklisted at a typical TGP for doing this?

Actually to answer my own post, I probably would. The submit script will try to fetch the thumbs and full size images to check them, but since it's unlikely it will accept and present a cookie the fetches will be 302'd. Submission rejected. :)

Oh well, I can still try it for internal use on my own sites...

That would not work. Download accelerators do not deal with cookies, and neither does media player or anything. Those people (theres a huge amount of em) will not be able to download. Not only that, TGPs scripts that check your page wont be able to download the movies, since they dont deal with cookies either.

You want a solution for hotlinking? Look in sig =)

Ive coded movie hot link protection which works sever side without need for hahahahahahahahahaha, cookies, or any other b.s. Also supports download accelerators, and TGP/MGP spiders that check content. Hit me up on icq if you need help, 36837470.

i checked out the demo. doesnt work. look at the sample page of the website hotlinking the microsoft badge. says its supposed to be a different image, but its not.

.htaccess is fun ;-)

well...just to clue you in...don't serve up the image unless it was called by an html page on your domain...do this with .htaccess