Hotlink Protection not working

[mackchad]

I have a customer who is trying to use the Hotlink Protection feature but it is not working. I have setup a test site that has hotlinked a gif image from my customer's site. Hotlink Protection is enabled in cPanel and gif is listed as an allowed extension. Can someone give me some pointers on what maybe causing the problem?

[cPanelDavidG]

I have a customer who is trying to use the Hotlink Protection feature but it is not working. I have setup a test site that has hotlinked a gif image from my customer's site. Hotlink Protection is enabled in cPanel and gif is listed as an allowed extension. Can someone give me some pointers on what maybe causing the problem?

Just to cover all bases here: the wording of this feature is notoriously confusing. By "allowed" it means what extensions are allowed to be blocked by Hotlink Protection. Therefore the intended behavior when "gif" is listed as an allowed extension is to block all hotlinking of .gif files. If that is not what is happening, then yes, there is a problem and it should be investigated.

[cPanelTodd]

If hotlinking is enabled for gif images as David stated above and you are able to hotlink the image, the problem is most likely due to rules within .htaccess. Most, if not all problems with hotlinking are due to custom settings in .htaccess that is causing the hotlink rules to be missed.

[mackchad]

Thanks guys, and yes Hotlink Protection is enabled and I am able to hotlink to a gif image from a test site. Here is the the .htaccess file as I have no idea what could be causing the problem and hopefully someone could point me in the right direction. Thanks in advance.



RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://canadascience.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://canadascience.com$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.canadascience.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.canadascience.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|bmp|mp3)$ - [F,NC]