how to track a hotlinker ?

[samer]

how can I track how's hotlinking me ? i have a lot of hits to my forum image files and CSS.

thanks.

[South]

They should show as referring urls in your stats.

[seonewbee]

Sountnow is right. They will be references in your logs for thes files without a page being called before the call for the image. Your log analysis software might list things by amount transfered and you might find them that way. They will show up as a lot of files transfered but no page views. Once you find them I would send a copy of part of your server logs to their ISP.

You have 2 options for stopping them until their ISP stops them.

1) This can also stop others in the future from doing it.

Simply add the below code to your .htaccess file, and upload the file either to your root directory, or to the directory where you keep your images on your site:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?mydomain.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg|png)$ - [F]
Be sure to replace "mydomain.com" with your own. The above code causes a broken image to be displayed when its hot linked.

2) If you know their IP. In your .htaccess file in your root directory

order allow,deny
deny from 123.45.6.7
deny from 012.34.5.
allow from all

Hope that this helps you.