This page will help you run some tests to show you that COLDLINK is a bulletproof solution to problems with hotlinks to content on your website. The later section of the procedure has two alternative procedures. This was introduced because many visitors do not have the time to allow the links to expire. New keys are generated every 20 seconds and remain valid for 5 minutes. As you run through the tests, remember that you can see the full url referenced by any link in the status bar of the browser by hovering the cursor over the link. You can download and examine the source code used for this site from our main downloads page to verify that this is a fair test. understanding urls you will be working with the actual content files on the server         /wall/one.jpg         /wall/two.jpg the processed urls appearing in this page as sent by server         /pipe/9a59e7c62aafc2f15a973638a7253cb2/one.jpg         /pipe/9a59e7c62aafc2f15a973638a7253cb2/two.jpg the underlined path portions of the urls before the file names one.jpg and two.jpg were automatically generated by the hotlink engine please read each step carefully before proceeding click on one.jpg to redisplay one.jpg in a new window to confirm that the link is still valid. if you want to use option b of the test, bookmark the new page for later use the real urls of the images on the server are /wall/one.jpg and /wall/two.jpg. click on either of the links to try accessing them directly. This shows that correctly guessing the real url is of no help. clear your browser cache to prevent locally cached content from giving you misleading test results. do not refresh the page after doing this, otherwise new links will be generated with new expiry times [hint: /tools/internet options/delete files in internet explorer] links expire in: seconds (countdown started at page load) OPTION A wait at least 6 minutes for the links to expire before proceeding with the remaining steps click on one.jpg to redisplay one.jpg in a new window. This will fail if your browser cache has been cleared click on two.jpg to display two.jpg. This will fail because the url has expired and it was never in the browser cache. optionally, perform a hard refresh to see that the links have changed completely [hint: ctrl+f5 in internet explorer] OPTION B finish reading this material to understand what to expect, then after at least 6 minutes have passed, try using the bookmark that you created earlier for one.jpg to see that the link has expired and become useless what you have seen protected urls expire in 5 minutes protected urls are not predictable in sequence protected urls can be embedded in static pages like this one protected urls cannot be accessed directly even having a valid http-referer and the same browser cannot defeat the hotlinking protection what this means hotlinking becomes completely impractical because a valid url only lasts 5 minutes and the next valid url is impossible to guess. this is plenty of time for legitimate site users to view your content without difficulty but much too short for a hotlink to be of any use to another site availability the coldlink hotlink prevention system is available as an iis isapi filter and a apache module and filter to protect and process links appearing in static and dynamic html pages. it is compatible all forms of dynamic pages such as ASP, PHP, CGI, JSP, ASP.NET.