Anti-Leech Attachments - prevent hotlinking and bandwidth theft!

[thanhdia]

Title : Anti-Leech Attachments

Version : 1.1

Coder : Jason Williams

Purpose : Prevent your forum attachments from being directly linked to - prevent bandwidth abuse.

Why : Bandwidth can be expensive, plus I was frustrated with one of my members linking to three video clips on my forum from his own site, effectively abusing the bandwidth I pay for, so I set about a system that stops hotlinking, but at the same time, as a courtesy, providing a dynamic link to the post containing the attachment.

How : This could be replicated very easily using .htaccess but the one thing that it can't do is give you the link to the attachment itself. This mod displays a message informing the user that hotlinking is not allowed, then giving them the link to the post to view the attachment directly.

Known Issues : The security can be defeated by using the drop down style menu on the Anti Leech page - this has only been confirmed as an issue on Firefox. I have unsucessfully tried to find a way of removing the drop down on that page only.

Confirmed working with vBSEO 3.2.0.

Important : This has been tested on 3.6.2 and 3.8, I can presume it will be compatible with 3.7.x because it works on 3.8 - as always BACKUP FIRST!

Demo : http://www.steadiforum.com/attachmen...9&d=1180779148

Installation :

1. Import Product - product-antileech.xml
2. Save bandwidth!

File uploads : 0
Files to Import : 1
New Templates : 1
New Phrases : 2
Uses Hooks : 1
Uses Queries : 1

History :
v1.0 - Original release

v1.1 - Added enable/disable option, tested on VB 3.8