Anti-hotlinking, Images Not Showing up and what Norton Firewall has to do with it

You stare at the impertinent little red X on the page. It defies you. You have no idea what is causing it: Your images are NOT showing up!!!

This could be happening for any of these reasons:

1. You have the image URL wrong.
   Symptoms: Your images load fine on the main page, but doesn't show up on your archive pages.

   Diagnosis: Don't take this as a personal insult on your skill in making pages. This is because the Keenspace system is rather different from the norm. Archive pages are kept in a special /d folder, which means it mangles your nice <img src="images/banner.jpg"> tag and tells the browser to look for your banner at http://yoursitename.keenspace.com/d/images/banner.jpg. Which in turn doesn't exist.

   Suggested Cure: Changing the images tag <img src="/images/banner.jpg"> . This tells the browser to go to root and search for /images/banner.jpg, which works fine. Alternatively you could put the full URL in: http://yoursitename.keenspace.com/images/banner.jpg

2. Your browser has been set to not leave referrers.
   Symptoms: Your images load up as blank white images or nothing at all. None of your images work... Not your banner, not your comics either.

   Diagnosis: Browsers such as Mozilla Firefox can be configured to not send referrers, which trips up Keenspace's Anti-hotlinking system.

   Suggested Cure: Set your preferences so they leave referrers for Keenspace sites.

3. Norton Firewall has caused Keenspace's Anti-hotlinking to Block Your Image.
   Symptoms: Your images load up as blank white images or nothing at all. None of your images work... Not your banner, not your comics either.

   Diagnosis:Basically, Keenspace has an anti-hotlinking system which does not allow images in the /images and /comics folders to be linked from outside the site. Some firewall programs that attempt to protect your privacy 'rip' images from the server so as not to leave a referrer. Keenspace detects this as hot-linking, as so blocks it, resulting in the white nosteal.gif being displayed. To test if this is really the case, pick any image you want, name it nosteal.jpg (or gif) and pop it into the /images folder. If the images all start showing up as that image, you know you have this problem.

   Suggested Cure: Fix Norton Firewall so it does things the right way ;)

   How to Fix Norton Firewall For Keenspace (Taken from another post here.

   1. Open the "Norton Personal Firewall" and click "Options" in the top menu and select "Personal Firewall".
   2. Click the "Web Content" tab
   3. Click "Add Site" located in the bottom left and enter "*.keenspace.com" then click "Ok".
   4. Highlight "*.keenspace.com" in the list of sites and then on the right uncheck the "Use default settings" on the "Information about visited sites" section and set it to "Permit"
   5. Click "Ok" at the bottom of the window and close the "Norton Personal Firewall" window.
   6. Refresh your web browser and you should see the site.

      Note:Some people have mentioned that the above method is not available for different versions of Norton. Please refer to Norton's support site for help on how to configure the settings to accept trusted sites.

   You can only link images such as banners and avatar pictures through SiteAdmin, using the Banners Option. See Faub's Banner Guide for more details.

4. Your image in is the wrong or is a corrupted format.
   Symptoms: You don't have a firewall, but somehow your image refuses to display. Usually it's only a few that have this problem, and not the whole lot.

   Diagnosis: There's been many reasons given for why images corrupt or are saved the the srong formats but in the right extension. Sometimes the image programs saves the images in something called ASCII format, sometimes it's something else.

   Suggested Cure: Make sure your images is saved in the correct format, and check on a different program or computer if you can. Reupload the image; delete the old one beforehand.

Hopefully that covers the three most important image problems. Happy Webcomicking!