RogueSkolar
Forum Replies Created
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Forum: Plugins
In reply to: [Imaguard] Whitelist Referrers/User AgentsHi there,
I was just thinking instead of having to whitelist referrers/UAs would it be more expedient to just blacklist instead. Don’t get me wrong the whitelist feature offers the granular control I need at the moment. The only problem I’ve faced is that some of my content is syndicated to various RSS feeds. I’ve also got a feedburner account. This content contains the images that also appear on my posts/pages. From my understanding these hotlinks will be blocked. I can always whitelist these but it gets hard to keep track of all these various locations. I was thinking it might be easier to just blacklist known offenders as they arise.
I might need to look into storing certain sets of images in different directories with a set of htaccess rules targeting these directories.
Kind regards.
Forum: Plugins
In reply to: [Imaguard] Version 1.3 releasedI’ve read a couple of reports of fansshare’s images starting to drop out of image search because of the said url tagging.
Nashua the redirect works. Think about whether you really need the watermark. From my understanding in the preview pane, google starts loading the cached thumbnail using javascript whilst it pulls in the full resolution image (which I assume it scales) via a hotlink. The Imaguard plugin intercepts this hotlink and sends back a plain html page. So what happens is that the preview image remains blurry (ie low quality cached thumbnail is used). For my purposes, this is enough of a deterrence for scrapers and it will probably be enough of an incentive to click on the image which of course will lead back to the original post. If scrapers want to lift the low-res preview then so be it. Can’t really do much about it and that traffic is useless anyway.
If the user clicks on the view-original, then they are also redirected back to the post via Imaguard.
It’s a win win.
This is a free plugin and the developer has done us all a service by developing it. No one is holding a gun to your head saying you must use it.
Forum: Plugins
In reply to: [Imaguard] Version 1.3 releasedHi there,
Great job on the new realease. I see you’ve rolled in a lot of the handy features.
Just wanted to point out, not sure if it was a simple oversight, is that the url in the line
$ir_location = "http://test.com/index.php?p=".ir_getpostidbyurl($_GET['img']);in the plugin’sindex.phpcauses the post to redirect to the said url. I fixed this by just changing it to my website’s url.Again fantastic job :-]
I spoke too soon.
Your image should still work in Google Image Search, though, since Googlebot-images stores a thumbnail on their server when crawling. The google image bot will normally use local referrers when crawling images, so it will see your images when crawling your site.
Brilliant. This was my main concern.
Since the hotlinked image never loads, it will stay blurred, which is normally good as it encourages users to either click on “see original” or the actual picture.
Yes precisely. Genius. This is exactly what I’m going for.
I’m much obliged for your direction.
Big props guy.
Just to clarify the above on my sandbox site I’ve got two [hot]links to the remote image. The implementation is as follows:
<!-- hotlinked image --> <figure> <img src="http://remotesite.com/wp-content/uploads/path-to-some-image.jpg" alt=""> <figcaption>Some image caption</figcaption> </figure> <!-- direct hyperlink to image --> <a href="http://remotesite.com/wp-content/uploads/path-to-some-image.jpg">Original Image</a>The redirect works like a charm with respect to the hyperlink. The image however does not show. What would be gravy is to have non aggresive watermark generated dynamically over the hotlinked image whilst also redirecting to origin page when the image is accessed via the hyperlink.
Kind regards.
Many many thanks. You are a gentleman/woman and a scholar
:-]But if you don’t mind redirecting to the first post where it was used
Actually this is perfectly fine and precisely what I’ve been trying to do because most of my images are “tied” to a unique post or page. I use the images in other places (posts) but only as an aside in post snippets. So in nearly all cases the place where they are most relevant contextually is the post they are tied to, or on which they first appear.
Happy to report I’ve tried this out and so far it seems to be performing well without a noticeable performance hit. I’ll need to monitor this over the coming weeks but so far it looks good.
One more question if I may, I’m currently using a less aggresive approach. Just for testing purposes, I’ve hotlinked an image from one of my sites (remote) on a sandbox site I’ve got running locally. The hotlinked image on the sanbox site is not showing (.ie it is blocked). Should this be the case? My thinking is that the image on the sandbox site should still show no?
Really great news to see you will consider the rolling in the origin post/page redirect in a future release. Very promising. I’ll be spreading the word about your plugin as far and wide as I can.
Looking forward to the next release.
Regards.
Awesome,
Thanks for the response. More than happy to rate it.
The current version was hurried through production as a lot of people were requesting the plugin after Google updated their image Search function.
I can imagine!
Yeah I’ve been hacking the core to try and get the functionality I need pending the next release.
I might be pushing it here, but what are the chances of redirecting the image to the actual post or page the image originates from? If possible instead of using the dynamically generated show-image page, I’d just like to redirect to the origin page for the obvious reason that these posts/pages are monetized and convert well.
I’d be really grateful if you consider making this an option in your next release. If you could give me a couple of pointers as to how I can go about this pending your next release, I’d doubly as grateful.
Regards.