[Feature Request] Enable|Disable Hotlinking

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#1

After a lot of discussion on the Discord and giving users some insight on the laws of user generated content that make it difficult to pursue art theft or for Patreon to enforce protection, @R3dFiVe suggested users shouldn’t be able to hotlink images so easily from Patreon. I think this is a wonderful idea with some slight modification. This would require some backend work but I don’t think it would be too complicated to implement with some time. User images are stored, if I recall correctly, with a creator-specific folder/identifier in the path, so it should be possible to:

1. Add Hotlinking settings to Creator Page settings.
2. Allow Hotlinking options: "Enabled, Disabled for Everything, Disabled for Patron Posts"
3. Allow custom domain entries for Whitelists and Blacklists for Hotlinking settings.

It won’t prevent all theft, but this way Patreon Creators can at least have a better control of use and link-sharing for content they store on Patreon. If someone hotlinks a page that doesn’t allow hotlinking or blacklists them from hotlinking, the image can be swapped with a generic “oops this user doesn’t allow their stuff to be shared this way” image, much like some WordPress or imagine storage services do.

9 Likes
#2

It goes beyond this. I discovered the hard way that deleting a post does NOT delete the hotlinked content! I had to involve support and it was nightmarish to deal with because of how the links are made.

I’d love to simply turn off hotlinking for everything and just point to the post.

4 Likes
#3

So, just to be clear: even if hotlinking were limited or banned, a hypertext link that points to someone’s public post would still be okay, because then people would have to follow it to Patreon to see the creator’s works, right?

2 Likes
#4

Yes, at least in my case. I want the link back to Patreon, just not direct links to content.

1 Like
#5

Provided i understand right, we’re talking about the fact that someone can right click > copy image link to someones image in a post on patreon and give it out to other people, even if those people arent logged in to patreon or are a patron.

So i could post something exclusive to my patrons and someone with access to it, could give that hotlink/direct link to that image, to anyone and it will work. No security. Not private to patrons. It’s only the post page link itself that is private to patrons. Hotlinking directly to an image is not private.

3 Likes
#6

Yep, just tested this and you can definitely link directly to images that are behind a paywall.

Patreon team, can you make it so that direct links like these redirect to the post itself so content can’t be spread without re-uploading?

3 Likes