Manage Hotlink Protection

Last Updated for InterWorx-CP version 3.0.1

An existing SiteWorx account. An existing .htaccess file.

Hotlink protection is useful to prevent other websites from embedding your site’s images, video, etc into their website, thereby “stealing” you’re site’s content and bandwidth.

1. Click on the Site Services menu if it is not already expanded.
2. Click on the ♦    Directory Options item.
3. You should now be looking at the Directory Options Management controls in the main content area.
4. Click the Hotlink Protection link for the directory you’d like to manage.
5. In the “Hotlink Protection Status” drop down, choose if you want the protection enabled immediately, or not. This option is useful if you’d like to turn your hotlink protection settings on or off quickly to see the difference, without deleting your hotlink protection settings and having to re-create them.
6. Enter file extensions you want to block hotlinking for in the “Blocked Extensions” box, one per line. For example, .gif, .jpg, .wmv, .mov, etc.
7. Enter domains you want to ALLOW hotlinking of your content from in the “Allowed domains” box.
8. You can choose if you’d like to allow direct access to the “blocked” content or not. An example of direct access would be accessing an image with your browser like this: http://yoursite.com/images/example.gif. If “Allow Direct Access” is “Off” this will not be allowed - the request will be blocked. If it is “On” then this type of direct access will be allowed, and only embeded hotlink attempts will be blocked.
9. If you want to replace the “blocked” content with another image file, you can enter the URL of this file in the “Replace with” text box. When this option is set with a valid absolute URL to an image file (e.g., http://www.somedomain.com/replaceimg.jpg), a hotlinked image will be replaced with this URL. If this option is not set, a hotlinked image will return a ‘403 Forbidden’ response.
10. Click the Update button.
11. You will see the following message at the top of the screen: » Hotlink Management updated: directory