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Website Troubles: Update
7 years ago
General
Thanks so much to all of you who replied to my previous journal, I really appreciate it! I'm glad to know my site seems to be working for most viewers, at least.
The problem, as I understand it, seems to be with Google. We block hotlinking on our sites (duoradon.com and artist86.com, my partner's site) because people link to our images on sites like 4chan and it sucks up our bandwidth. Our web service does not give us unlimited bandwidth so we had to quell that.
Google has recently changed its search function and they put up protection against "cloaked" images, meaning one picture shows up in the image search but when you click it, you get something different. We don't do that, but evidently Google's new search triggers our htaccess and people trying to view my images via Google will end up seeing our warning notice instead of my site. We're not actively blocking Google, but the new bot seems to think we are.
I do not currently have a fix for this. Other people are having the same problem and are equally frustrated. Google Help admits that anti-hotlinking tools will cause the problem but offer no solution that will allow you to keep htaccess.
My site is due for a complete overhaul but I'm too occupied with commissions to put much work into it right now. I hope I can find a solution by then, but for now, parts of my site might not work if you're using Google. If you access the site by typing https://www.duoradon.com in the address bar, or just use the links provided in my profile info here on FA, it should work for you.
The problem, as I understand it, seems to be with Google. We block hotlinking on our sites (duoradon.com and artist86.com, my partner's site) because people link to our images on sites like 4chan and it sucks up our bandwidth. Our web service does not give us unlimited bandwidth so we had to quell that.
Google has recently changed its search function and they put up protection against "cloaked" images, meaning one picture shows up in the image search but when you click it, you get something different. We don't do that, but evidently Google's new search triggers our htaccess and people trying to view my images via Google will end up seeing our warning notice instead of my site. We're not actively blocking Google, but the new bot seems to think we are.
I do not currently have a fix for this. Other people are having the same problem and are equally frustrated. Google Help admits that anti-hotlinking tools will cause the problem but offer no solution that will allow you to keep htaccess.
My site is due for a complete overhaul but I'm too occupied with commissions to put much work into it right now. I hope I can find a solution by then, but for now, parts of my site might not work if you're using Google. If you access the site by typing https://www.duoradon.com in the address bar, or just use the links provided in my profile info here on FA, it should work for you.
I just typed https://www.duoradon.com into the address bar and got your anti-hotlinking warning instead of the site.
The web server is not serving the site properly over a secure connection.
Insecure HTTP works fine. It's just secure HTTPS that's broken. You could always just turn off https entirely and that would force it back to http; a lot of stuff defaults to https these days.
Thanks for your help!
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Googlebot [NC]
You should also add your https site in there to fix the issue rnixon pointed out. My guess is is should look like this:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^https://(www\.)?duoradon\.com/ [NC]
This all assumes you're using fall though filtering and your last rule is the hotlink redirect. If you've only got a single rule that redirects to the hotlink image you'll need to invert the logic.
The whole thing should look sort of like this:
RewriteEngine On
#this assumes you want to allow connections with NO referrer. remove the next line if you want to block those too.
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?duoradon\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^https://(www\.)?duoradon\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^Googlebot [NC]
RewriteRule \.(jpeg|jpg|gif|png)$ http://www.jackal86.100megs8.com/Forbbutt.gif [NC,R,L]