question about some site called "Dizzler"

[mickeym]

I'd never heard of such a thing, until I was looking at my stats for my site last night/early this morning.

I get that it's some sort of online music/filesharing site...but y'all, in my site stats? Were these things, jumping out at me:

My Chemical Romance - Famous Last Words: 192 Error Hits
Enrique Iglesius - Do You Know What It Feels Like - 37 Error Hits
Cascade - Ready For Love - 16 Error Hits

Now, those songs were up there, in a storage folder I keep for transferring files. In this case, those were some songs Matthew had asked me to find for him (songs used for some of the song vids he's watched that he liked). They ended up getting left up there for a few days for any number of reasons, but anyway. I deleted them out a few days ago. And then find all these hits last night, and it makes me wonder...was it using MY bandwidth, when whoever was connecting to them, when they were up?

The storage folder being used had to be known to someone who reads this journal. Maybe a public post, from sharing music and whatnot, though usually I upload stuff I'm planning to share into a couple particular folders.

I don't want to have to stop sharing media uploads, or music, or whatever with y'all. But the idea of someone sharing stuff that I haven't even made public really makes me uneasy.

Thought? Comments? Suggestions? Thanks.

ETA: Also, through further checking of my site stats, I see that that those files were dl'd 40x, 5x and 3x respectively, while they were still up there. And I know I didn't share those with anyone; they were *just* for Matthew, because he wanted them. Argh, this is making me nuts!

Comments

[rivers-bend.livejournal.com]

I dont' really understand these things, but I do have a vague notion that some sites you get from send a 'tracker' sort of thing with the song so that it's available on your computer for other people who want to get it from that site. I could be totally misunderstanding what I read, so don't take my word.

[giogio.livejournal.com]

How's your robots file set up? Site permissions? It could be that people are googling and finding these files because your site is being indexed and it's a public folder.

[mickeym.livejournal.com]

I...don't know? Heh. I know I have a "robots.txt" file in the main directory--but what do I need to do, beyond that?

[giogio.livejournal.com]

Well, the first thing you want to do is stop reputable sites from indexing certain folders. You do that by adding code like this:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /matthewsstuff/

Where the asterisk denotes all indexing services, and the you give the path for the folder you don't want indexed after the first forward slash. So, for instance, this:

User-agent: ia_archiver
Disallow: /

means that the webarchive is not allowed to index any pages on the site.

This:

User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: /authors/pressreleases/

Means that Google is not allowed to index any files in the at [www.domain.com]/authors/pressreleased.

As a next step, you can also password-protect access to certain folders by locking them in your CPanel to certain users.

[rainbow.livejournal.com]

that is sort of freaky, that somebody could get to your server like that! O.O

[pacific-gravity.livejournal.com]

Something like that happened with me a couple of years ago, before I knew what a boon robots.txt could be. In my case it was some site with a spider that crawled the web and posted links to random folders that had media files in them. I didn't check my stats that often, so I didn't even realize something was wrong until the bandwidth hit something like 350 MB in two days.

[rahaeli.livejournal.com]

Put a blank index.html in whatever directory you've got media in.