Hi Martin!
Jumping through a bunch of hoops and spending money isn't going to seriously stop anyone who wants the content/pictures. Eric's advice is right on. Low res and watermarked pictures are your best defence against having the pictures reposted elsewhere. That being said, I have a few suggestions to protect your site from the most obvious types of automations and "theft".
These depend on the level of control you have over the site. They are useful if you have complete control over the site and the server it sits on, webserver and serverserver.
On the first one, There's a question you need to answer for yourself. Is this a "Public" website? I mean is it a place you want, or are trying to drive unknown users to? Or is it mostly "Private", meaning you're going to distrube a link to friends and family (and WIX
)?
In either case, become familiar with the file, robots.txt, and how to use it. Spiders from reputable companies like google obey the instructions in the robots.txt file. If you don't care if the entire world knows about your site and it's contents, leave the file out. Google's spider will crawl your entire site and index it. Then when anyone makes a search asking for something your site is related to, you come up. That goes for images also. If you don't want that to happen, using the robots.txt file will tell the spider to leave, or most anything inbetween.
Of course, this will not stop any ol loser from telling a spider to disregard the robots.txt file. To stop the losers who crawl anonymously without regard for owners wishes, require a log in. This will make a spider fail and move on.
Read your logs. Set webserver logging to very-very-verbose. Log everything. This should not be a problem for you, size wise, unless your site gets 10k+ hits daily. After the first couple of weeks, the log size should settle down to something expected everyday. Then you only have to read it if there is a big change in logfile size. Get a logfile analyzer, there are some good freebies available out there. This will shorten the amount of time you spend looking for something in there. Doing this will allow you to......
Block IP addresses. See anything goofy in the log, block them. This will not stop someone from using an anon-proxy and doing what they want to do anyway. Sooooo, before you set up the webserver, look up the most popular anonymous proxies first, and pre-block them.
Monitoring. If your website is hosted by a service, they usually have some kind of monitoring available. Set it to email or page you if traffic spikes beyond a certain level during a certain period of time. If you are hosting your own server, it can be monitored in the OS and the server and set to do the same thing. This will allow you to try and stop someone using something like webstripper from manually downloading your entire site. It will also alert you to any problems that are beginning to happen.
Block the inbound use of [IMG] tags. A good example of this is webshots. Try to post an [IMG] tag here, from webshots, and see what happens.
If you're running a forum also, require a log in, disable [IMG] tags in it. If you have to have [IMG] tags, require your users to have a reasonble post count before they are able to use them, 50 is a good number. Same thing for guestbooks, require a log in, ect.....
Keep your webserver patched. Keep the OS its sitting on patched. If it's an IIS website, use iislockd on the webserver, and have a good virus checker on the serverserver.
Disable directory browsing.
This seems like a lot. It's not. Most of this work is done before you come online with the site. The rest requires a few minutes a day. These will stop the most obvious forms of content theft. They are also helpful if you're paying for bandwidth by use. Some of these things you should do regardless of the content issue, it's just being a good internet citizen.
I run many corporate websites and have helped friends and family with theirs also. I've blocked entire countries and continents from some of them. It's surprising how the level of BS associated with running a website day to day goes to almost zero when you block, sayyy, the entire country of China from accessing it. Block at the POP, thats my motto.
Hope this helps a little,
Orvis
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