website changes

[Brett Dikeman]

On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 1:06 AM, John Cody Forbes <cody at 5000tq.com> wrote:
> John Cody Forbes wrote:
> http://jcforbes.com/jcfpics/otheraudi/audifans

Shoot.  Looks like the code to prevent people from ripping images from
the site isn't working properly (that's the image that is
substituted.)  I wonder why...

Basically, when your browser asks for any file from a webserver, it
includes a 'referral' URL in the request. The same happens when you
click on a link to a new site; the new site gets a request with a
referral URL that is the page you were on.

For that image, the referral is http://www.audifans.com/index.php (the
main page.)  If the referral doesn't have www.audifans.com or
audifans.com in it, it will redirect to /thanks_for_stealing.jpg.
This was implemented because guys on motorgeek, vwvortex, and
audiworld were using the marketplace to host images for classifieds
postings on those sites, racking up our bandwidth bill.  When someone
links to an image hosted on audifans, the referral URL will be from
the site they're on.

Cody, do you have some sort of anonymous surfing plugin installed?
Also- can you privately email me your IP address and I'll take a look
at the server logs?

> Anybody else able to replicate this?

I'm curious too - can anyone else reproduce this?  If possible, please
test with all the browsers you have available to you, and if it
happens- give me the time/date and your IP address (so I can look in
the logs.)  I only have Firefox and Safari, and it works fine in both;
I've tried clearing my cache, hitting it by manually entering the URL,
hitting it from a link outside the site (google), etc....every time it
loads normally.

Ah, I just saw Robert's reply that it happens only in IE for him.
I'll see what I can find out, and maybe in the meantime whitelist that
one image.

Brett