Hello, i am having image hotlink protection problem in my nginx need help. i have a huge issue of my site's images being submited to social networks like stumbleupon with direct link ... xxxxx.jpg

which some times get huge traffic and increases cpu usage plus bandwidth usage. what i am trying to do is block direct access to image from other refrers and hotlink protection.

Here is the code from my vhost.conf

 server {
  access_log off;

  error_log  logs/vhost-error_log warn;
  listen    80;
  server_name  mydomain.com www.mydomain.com;

  # uncomment location below to make nginx serve static files instead of Apache
  # NOTE this will cause issues with bandwidth accounting as files wont be logged
  location ~* \.(gif|jpg|jpeg|png|wmv|avi|mpg|mpeg|mp4|htm|html|js|css)$ {
   root   /home/username/public_html;
   expires 1d;
  }

   root   /home/mydomain/public_html;
}


  location / {
   client_max_body_size    10m;
   client_body_buffer_size 128k;

   proxy_send_timeout   90;
   proxy_read_timeout   90;

   proxy_buffer_size    4k;
   # you can increase proxy_buffers here to suppress "an upstream response
   #  is buffered to a temporary file" warning
   proxy_buffers     16 32k;
   proxy_busy_buffers_size 64k;
   proxy_temp_file_write_size 64k;

   proxy_connect_timeout 30s;

   proxy_redirect  http://www.mydomain.com:81   http://www.mydomain.com;
   proxy_redirect  http://mydomain.com:81   http://mydomain.com;

   proxy_pass   http://ip_address/;

   proxy_set_header   Host   $host;
   proxy_set_header   X-Real-IP  $remote_addr;
   proxy_set_header   X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;

   expires       24h;

  }
  }

So for hotlink protection i added this code :

location ~* (\.jpg|\.png|\.gif|\.jpeg)$ {
     valid_referers blocked www.mydomain.com mydomain.com;
     if ($invalid_referer) {
        return 403;
     }

This is how the current nginx code for this domain looks like but didn't worked:

 server {
  access_log off;

  error_log  logs/vhost-error_log warn;
  listen    80;
  server_name  mydomain.com www.mydomain.com;

  # uncomment location below to make nginx serve static files instead of Apache
  # NOTE this will cause issues with bandwidth accounting as files wont be logged
  location ~* \.(gif|jpg|jpeg|png|wmv|avi|mpg|mpeg|mp4|htm|html|js|css)$ {
   root   /home/username/public_html;
   expires 1d;
  }

   root   /home/mydomain/public_html;
}
  location ~* (\.jpg|\.png|\.gif|\.jpeg)$ {
     valid_referers blocked www.mydomain.com mydomain.com;
     if ($invalid_referer) {
        return 403;
     }


  location / {
   client_max_body_size    10m;
   client_body_buffer_size 128k;

   proxy_send_timeout   90;
   proxy_read_timeout   90;

   proxy_buffer_size    4k;
   # you can increase proxy_buffers here to suppress "an upstream response
   #  is buffered to a temporary file" warning
   proxy_buffers     16 32k;
   proxy_busy_buffers_size 64k;
   proxy_temp_file_write_size 64k;

   proxy_connect_timeout 30s;

   proxy_redirect  http://www.mydomain.com:81   http://www.mydomain.com;
   proxy_redirect  http://mydomain.com:81   http://mydomain.com;

   proxy_pass   http://ip_address/;

   proxy_set_header   Host   $host;
   proxy_set_header   X-Real-IP  $remote_addr;
   proxy_set_header   X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;

   expires       24h;

  }
  }

Thank you in advance :)

cheers