Due to two instances of bandwidth theft -- one confirmed, the other suspected -- I'm looking for a tutorial on how to write a robots.txt file to keep 'bots away. The confirmed theft was from a directory which my webhost doesn't allow for displaying as it lacks an index page, but if you google for the picture, it shows up. The whole situation preplexes me because the picture was something I'd created for one of Rocky's stories and so basically, someone is using this bookcover as their sig file.

Since I'm not sure whether I can ban direct linking images the way free servers like Geocities have (somehow, from SaRa's recent experiences, I don't think it's something that can be done, but I've got queries out to confirm), I've decided to do the next best thing, which is to prevent google and other search engines from indexing my images. I'm also contemplating disabling right-click -- I don't mind if people save my images to their hard drive (well, I mind with this one, because it took me quite a while to make it and it was a gift to Rocky and not intended for anyone else's use), but right -click also gives the option to copy link location; I use it plenty myself.

Among the articles I found on robots.txt was this one which claims writing such a file is tricky unless one buys this company's software. I was especially amused because it looks like that article is on a link farm and the company's real site has a proper (if not slightly confused) tutorial on robots.txt here. The article here is less wishy-washy. Anyway, I'll probably hit jemima up for help just to make sure I've done it properly.