Make Money with Image Hosting

Many users continually use their paid-for computer with their recurring internet costs to find ways to make some of that (or dare we say, make a profit) back.

One of the newer ways is image hosting from companies who pay YOU to host YOUR images on their web site. That's right, due to some extraordinary sponsorships these web sites have, they can pay for their storage and bandwidth while at the same time, pay the users who uploaded the images.

Is this the new era of making money online? Nay. I have a huge collection of pictures I can upload, do you think it'll be enough? Nay.

There are mainly two web paying image hosts out there, www.ImageCash.net and www.ImageFap.com . Both companies pay at a different rate while both use the same methods of payment (E-gold, Stormpay, and if your payment is high enough even check). But at what rate can images make you money, you are probably asking yourself.

ImageCash:
----------------------
ImageCash started this revolution and has since taken on a huge name for itself. Their servers are extremely fast considering the amounts of traffic they recieve and the popup advertising is at a minimum. You may wish to use your advertisement blockers, though, as they have a fair number of those.

At first ImageCash would convert your image views to cash every 24 hours and show your pending earnings in your member account. Over the past month and a half, now going on two months, ImageCash has been suffering due to sponsors dropping them in the middle of the month leaving one hefty bandwidth bill for ImageCash and a sad image view-to-dollar converstion ratio for the image uploaders.

We are lucky if ImageCash converts our image views to money every two weeks. This makes it difficult for those with high traffic web sites sending in massive traffic and not knowing for a few weeks what the converstion will be like.

ImageCash pays 66 percent of the daily (weekly/biweekly) profit after server expenses which can be mediocre or it can be devistatingly low.

For the month of May, 2006 I accumulated 138,000 unique image views and recieved $1.30 for it. Most of these were users directed from my high-traffic teen picture portal and as you can see, even with a successfull site, it would be extremely difficult to make more than a few dollars a day.

ImageFap
ImageFap is copy of ImageCash, they even decided to make a near duplicate of ImageCash's template.

Their servers are extremely slow and numerous outages throughout the day occur leaving the site inoperable during these periods of time. They use nasty advertisers which can sometimes popop on even the most stubborn popup blockers. The ads can be really overwhelming at times making it more work than it's worth.

Their current image view convertion ratio is approximately $1 per 5,550 image views. This is much higher than ImageCash and you only recieve this ratio if most of your traffic is U.S. or Western Europe visitors.

With the higher payout ratio, one might expect this is the better place to put your images up and make a few dollars. Unfortunately, due to the extremely slow servers and daily outtages, most visitors won't surf past the second or third image.


Traffic Chart:
--------------------------
I used 5 image galleries containing the same number of images on both image host providers for the same duration of time.

Provider Time Views Pay
ImageCash 2 hours 18,215 ?
ImageFap 2 hours 137 $.02

ImageCash 1 day 123,448 ?
ImageFap 1 day 14,52 $.27



From the chart above, you can see ImageCash is a lot easier and faster for visitors to use which makes it so much easier to bank image views. Even though the payout ratio isn't defined, the money making opportunities are far better with ImageCash.

To signup for ImageCash and start earning money for your pictures TODAY, http://www.ImageCash.net

Misc Perl rants & praises

First rant goes to the SWF* module package. This module was created back in 2001 (or was it 2003). Since then, there haven't been any SWF* updates or documentation written by the author or by user's who figured out how to use it.

There are some perl modules that you can figure out just by looking at the synopsis and sample code, but when you're working with an entirely foreign language (Flash) its hard to make good of any of the code.

The module is so outdated or impossible to work with that I actually brought myself to posting for help on RentACoder, Kasamba and GetACoder and zero people even made an attempt and finding a working solution.

So until this SWF package gets fixed, and with MING out of the picture, Perl has no way to create Flash movies. If you're an extremely talented yet bored Perl scripter and have some free time, use these original SWF* modules as a roughdraft and update everything.


The praise for the day is for WWW::Mechanize. It is one of the easiest and, depending what you use Perl for, one of the most used Perl modules. It's a shame it doesn't come prepackaged with ActiveState.

WWW::Mechanize allows you to create web bots (site scrapers) and automated form fillers in a snatch. It's so powerful, it can interact with any form element whether it be a textfield, radio button, hidden field or button.

It uses the LWP:: core functions making it even more customizable. There aren't many documentations on how to use LWP with WWW::Mechanize, but after playing around a little bit, you'll figure it out.

-----------------------------------
I am currently using WWW::Mechanize to create a web-based search engine submission script. So far, everything is running as smooth as a script could, but collecting the engine data is extremely time consuming. Not to mention, it's hard to get legit search engines that don't use image verification codes.

This is current engine database
NAME SUBMIT_URL FORM_NAME FORM_PARAMS CHECKBOXES SUCCESS_TXT
Aesop::http://www.aesop.com/cgi-bin/aesopadd.cgi::2::EMAIL= $email,URL=$url,NAME=$name, VERIFIER=072-58::terms=yes::Thank you for using
Amidalla::http://www.amidalla.com/add.htm::1:: addurl=$url::::thank you for
Axxasearch::http://www.axxasearch.com/submit-site.htm: :submit_url_form::required-www=$url,required-email= $name::::Thank you for
EVisum::http://www.evisum.com/addsite.htm::1:: URL=$url,email=$email::::Your site will be reviewed
EntireWeb::http://www.entireweb.com/free_submission/::addurl:: URL=$url,Email=$email::::We have sent you
ExactSeek::http://www.exactseek.com/add.html::2:: URL=$url,EMAIL=$email,NAME=$name, VERIFIER=072-58,action=submit::verify=yes::Thank you for using
SearchWho:: http://www.searchwho.com/cgi-bin/addsite.pl::2:: v_title=$title,v_url=$url,v_email=$email, v_directory=$directory,v_comments= $comments, db=general::::Thanks for submitting

If anyone has time and wants to contribute to this project, the engine data is broken into the following blocks.

1) Engine name, followed by ::
2) Engine submission page URL, followed by ::
3) The form name or number. form name="bob" may be found in the HTML code. If it's not, you need to count how many <form> tags there are before the form for the subission. The database needs the name if it's found, or the form number. Followed by ::
4) All the form fields the form has (required or not), including hidden paramaters. This is case-sensitive. It requires a field_name=value. If it's the URL, append the variable $url. Name, url, comments, directory, email have $name, $url, $comments, $directory and $email respectively. If it's a hidden field, take the value that it tells you in the HTML code and assign it with the value, not a variable. They all need to be comma separated WITHOUT SPACES. Do not include checkboxes in this section. Followed by ::
5) This is identical to #4 but this is only for checkboxes. Same syntax as above. Se the checkbox_name=the_value. Followed by ::
6) Lastly, after a successful submission there should be some text saying it succeeded. It only needs a few words that will NOT appear if the submission fails.

This database will remain a textfile to make it infinitely easier to update.

Interesting Perl GOTCHA

######################
# file.txt
######################
name=$name
age=$age


######################
# gotcha.pl
######################
#!/usr/bin/perl

use warnings;
use strict;

my $name = "Yoda";
my $age = "100 million years";

open(LOG, "file.txt") or die "error: $!";
my $contents = <LOG>
close(LOG) or die "error: $!";

print $contents; #gotcha!

######################
# Results
######################
name=$name
age=$age

######################
# Expected results
######################
name=Yoda
age=100 million years


What's happening:
When loading the file into your script, you may expect that the $ variables are substituted. Instead, the file is being read literally meaning every character is that character, it's not special.

One workaround is to substitute the $content variable for the new information.

$content =~ s/\$name/$name/;
$content =~ s/\$age/$age/;

Which will present the expected results nicely.

Shopping Cart Shipping

If you're online selling products from a web site, chances are you're using a shopping cart. It may have been a premade solution, or one you hired to have custom developed to suit your needs.

About 30 Earth revolutions ago I was in the middle of designing a complete shopping cart solution from scratch using Perl and MySQL. After working on the shipping module, I found myself getting confused at how other carts calculate shipping totals.

When inserting items into a cart, there are two options you can use in a typical situation. You can define the item's physical height and width dimensions along with the weight, or you can define a preset price to ship the product at.

Sounds simple, so what is the issue?

If all items in the cart have a unique preset shipping charge and the web visitor purchases 15 items from you, do you honestly expect them to pay shipping for 15 separate items? If this happened, the potential buyer would have a heart attack, blink a time or two, recover from the heart attack and move on to another web site with cheaper shipping.

If you provide a dimension-based shipping, are there more efficient ways of combining multiple products of the order in a single box to save on shipping fees? If so, how would your ecommerce solution figure out the simplest and least expensive way to ship?

You could, in theory, take the dimensions of the box and calculate the square inches. Then take numerous products and take the sum of those dimensions to see if they could all fit. There would have to be some physical limit on height and width to ensure it fits in the box, since all products could come in different shapes and sizes there is no way to guarantee they can fit in the box.

Then you have to account for shipping materials inside the box to protect the items from moving around and breaking. How much of your box can you assume will be taken up with each purchase? Would you wrap each individual item or just around the outsides of the box to prevent movement? Is it possible you may have an extremely light and fragile item in a box with heavy metal items?

When you ask yourself these questions, how do shopping carts provide shipping fees? As it turns out, shipping is more of an estimate than a reality. Shipping could cost more or less depending on the type of products you order and how the supplier needs to package them.

Even though live results for an X by X by X package on USPS, UPS or FedEx, this is assuming the box and all contents will safely fit inside. There is no way to be 100% sure how shipping will work until you've personally looked at the order.

Since shipping carts cannot process accurate shipping fees for combined purchaces, the simplest way to cover any extra fees is to add a surcharge onto all shipping fees. As you may already know, most companies charge a base fee + live shipping charges just in case.

There might be a morale issue when it comes to providing live shipping quotes and applying your base fee (unless it's stated in the cart that a base fee will be applied) if the buyer belives your shipping charges with the base fee are actually live quotes from the mailing service. If the user is told the stats are collected live, they should also know you plan on tacking more money onto it so when they get the order and see what it cost, they don't feel scammed out of a few extra dollars.

In closing, shipping modules in carts are pretty much useless and raw estimates. You cannot determine exactly how items will ship if the buyer purchases multiple items. If you only sell items of similar size and fragility, shipping charges could prove to be extraordinarily accurate. For the rest of the world, unless the shopping cart has an artifial human brain powering its electrons, you may not be able to provide accurate shipping quotes.

Making money online (freelance)

Many people who use the internet on a regular basis feel the great need to find ways to create an extra income. The internet is full of people who spend months, possibly years, of their life trying to master a computer trade. Whether it be graphic design, programming, internet marketing or even computer tech support.

Where do people do people go to make money online selling their brains and expertise? One might create a web site with a really spiffy portfolio on the false hope that maybe someday in the future a web visitor will stop by and become so impressed that they request your services. The main problem with this idea is the amount of competiting web sites that offer just as much, if not more, than you do. Unless you are an experienced internet marketer, it will be a very difficult task to bring your digital resume/portfolio to the first page or two of any search engine.

As is common internet knowledge, if a web site isn't found within the first two pages of a search, chances are very slim users will view your site.

So how do people go about selling themselves to buyers?

The key to any successful freelancing campaign is the right place to do it. There are many freelance web sites available for all sorts of specialties. Whether it be graphic design, programming, game design, legal, creative writing, marketing or even answering simple to complex technical questions about computers or networking.

Each provider charges specific fees and has a completely unique community of interested buyers.

www.RentACoder.com
RentACoder is one of the longest running and most successful internet-based freelance services around. While many sites are still brand new with a minimal customer base, RentACoder has been serviced to hundreds of thousands of buyers and is currently paying over 120,000 freelancers worldwide for their services.

The good:
It is completely free for the buyer to post a non-obligated project. RentACoder does not offer an enhanced project allowing some projects to become featured and more noticible by potential freelancers.

This ensures every project has the equal chance of recieving attention. It is fair for buyers, and cheaper.

RentAcoder charges a low 15% commission fee on any successful project. If the project was worth $100, the freelancer would walk away with $85.00.

One of the most valuable features RentACoder has that most freelance sites don't offer is a blind bidding auction. This means the freelancers are unable to view any information regarding other people's bids. All you can see is the number of placed bids, not who placed them or how much was asked.

This eliminates undercutting which makes it more fair for the freelancer. Without knowing what your competition is saying or bidding, everyone has a fair chance of getting the project.

RentACoder also uses a third party arbitration counsel. When a project is accepted, the buyer releases funds to RentACoder for safe holding. The payment is held until the buyer states the project is 100% complete and meets all expectations and requirements. At this time, RentACoder releases the funds into the freelancer's account.

In case of a problem, each party as a neutral counsel. If the project was done poorly or the freelancer "disappeared" from communication, the project can be placed into arbitration and have a third party work out how the project will close.

This ensures a safe environment for both buyers and freelancers.

RentACoder does not have a payout limit. You will be paid out twice every month that you have any amount of money. You can also apply your credit towards paying for services from other people, as well. No other freelance site allows you to directly pay others with your earned (but not paid) income.

The bad:
-

Please click the following icon to get started with RentACoder.



www.GetACoder.com
GetACoder is a newer freelance web site that was brought together using an inexpensive "freelance site" script. Although there are many sites using the exact same setup as GetACoder, they do have a good coder base with talented coders.

The good:
The number of projects that get posted are quite promising and it's rare that a project will go by without any bids being placed. Some projects get over 80+ bids, which is far more than any other freelance web site.

If someone needed a project done, it wouldn't be hard to find an experienced freelancer on GetACoder.

GetACoder charges a $5.00 base fee per each project + 10% of the total project cost. This means, for a $100.00 project, the freelancer would walk away with $85.00. If you are a permium member, the $5.00 base fee is dropped. According to their FAQ, you don't pay any commission fees if you pay $7.95 per month for a premium membership. Their price guidline for coders doesn't show this, all it says is the $5.00 base fee is dropped.

GetACoder offers an affiliate program which gives you a base fee for each sale. You only get paid if the user you refer becomes a PREMIUM member. An example of the affiliate ad is seen below.




The bad:
GetACoder uses open bidding which means all bids are seen by every visitor of the web site. Everyone, including your comptetition, knows how much you bid on a project and what you said.

This practice makes it unfair for the first few bidders as they have no idea what everyone else will be saying. For everyone else, all they need to do is look at the proposed bid price and undercut it a few dollars. Open bidding makes it an unfair environment.

GetACoder freelancers also charge higher than any other freelance site with the exception of just one. Even though there is competition to lower their prices, the freelancers have rediculously high prices. Many projects that are posted on GetACoder go unawarded because the average price is far outside the buyers budget.

Another setback for GetACoder is the time it takes to post a project. It isn't immediate like other freelance sites. When a project is posted, it needs to be manually approved which, in my experience, can take up to three days. If you are in a rush to get a project done, GetACoder is not the service to use.


www.Elance.com
Elance is one of the oldest and most trusted freelance web sites. They were stated back in 1999. In the early 2000s, Elance changed drastically to improve revenue while charging freelancers nearly triple the original fees.

Instead of charging commission fees, freelancers are charged subscription fees. There are multiple levels of subscriptions, each with an increase in cost and each category with a different fee. Freelancers must subscribe separately to the categories they want. For example, if you wanted to offer services in Management & Finance, you would pay $95.00 per month. For Website Development, you would have to pay Elance $245.00 each month or $1195.00 each year.

Elance charges 8.75% commission fees for each project ($10.00 minimum fee) on top of large monthly fees per each category you are a service provider. Fee example is not available due to each category costing different fees.

The good:
Elance reserves minimum fees per category posting. This means, each category (graphics, software, marketing, web design) has a different set of fees associated with it. With minimum project fees, this ensures that service providers cannot underbid each other.

Elance used to be the world's largest freelance databases. It's still one of the leaders which means many users post projects there and are looking for freelancers.

Elance has a great track record and provides an affiliate program. Due to the costs of Elance, it's very difficult to get freelancers to sign up, however.

The bad:
The fees make it very difficult to get started. Whether you apply for one job, or 100, you will still be charged a large monthly fee. You will get charged even if you do not sign into your member account for that month.

If a buyer has a small project, for instance a 10 minute Flash project, they will not be placing projects on Elance. Since there is a minimum fee for each category, Elance is primarily for larger projects.

www.Kasamba.com
Kasamba is a company who's been around a number of years now but their numbers are growing slowly. The numbers were growing up until the middle of December, 2006 until the new fees were updated.

One of the unique services Kasamba has to offer is a live chat. They were the first and remaining the only freelance company that offers the ability for questions and answers to be provided LIVE TIME via a browser window at a per-minute fee. If a project is small and needs an immediate solution, you can talk live to a specialist and get your answer in as little as 2-3 minutes.

The good:
Kasamba offers a live chat system which allows you to chat live to a buyer or freelancer. The browser window automatically tracks time and displays it for both parties so you know how much you are going to make or pay out. This session fee can be set to any price per minute the freelancer desires. Some charge as little as $0.25-$0.25 cents per minute. Others charge $0.75-$2.00+.

The bad:
Kasamba practices open bidding where everyone can view the bids of other freelancers. This makes it less fair for the first few bidders and assures people will underbid their competition.

Kasamba charges large commission fees for both live chat and single projects. They charge 30% commission fees and have a hold limit of $50.00. You will be forced to wait until you reach $50.00 before you see money.

Kasamba does offer an affiliate program. Please click Need Programming Help? Click Here Now! to get started with Kasamba.

Are there ways to make money online?

This question has come and gone many times, many blue moons have passed and gerbils have died in persuit of the one true answer.

Outside of making money directly from a web site by selling services or products, is it possible to make money online? Not just a few cents here or a dollar there. But is it possible to indeed make enough money to live on?

After being online since the last dinosaur extinction, I've seen every type of get-rich-quick scheme there is. You have pyramid scams, web site advertisements, short term e-gold investments, and the new incentive-based image host.

We will look into web site advertisements at this time.

1) Web site advertisements

Having 4 complete web sites online, two of which have a PR of 4+ and one recieving almost 1 million hits per month, it's tough to pull in a few dollars per day from advertisements.

The best known web sponsor is Google AdSense because it's backed by the company we've all grown to love and trust over the years. They started the "relevant ad" revolution which helped create more meaningful advertisements on your page that users might actually click.

They may be more relevant ads, but that doesn't necessarily mean more users are going to click on them.

In total, my sites recieve anywhere between 0 and 7 clicks per day. The median is around 2.5-3.1 click throughs on any one given day. In total, my average daily income from Google AdSense is around 40-43 cents. 43 cents per day would accumulate to a mere $12.90 per month. It's not nearly enough to pay rent, but it almost pays for web hosting.

Google has a $100 payout limit which all payments are kept until your current balance meets or exceeds this total. At $12.90 a month, it takes an average of just over 8 months to recieve payment.

In short, unless you are one of the very few sites that perform extraordinarily well with Google AdSense or other advertisements, chances are slim you'll make much of a profit.

There used to be CPM (cost per thousand) sponsors out there that would allow you to host their link or banner for a set price per thousand impressions. For each 1,000 unique impressions you would recieve anywhere between $.05 and $1.70. Today's average has dropped down to $0.23-$0.30 CPM.

Since then, sponsors changed their form of advertisements and went from banner ad impressions to popups. Each time a visitor would visit your site (or leave), they would get a popup window with the page your sponsor is paying you to advertise. Not only does this annoy your web visitors, but at the time it guaranteed that their page would be seen.

Today, things have changed with how browsers recieve popup windows. Browsers like FireFox have a built in popup blocker. Some browsers like Internet Explorer have toolbars that can be installed to block popups.

Most internet surfers no longer recieve popups, which as you may expect, make it difficult to get users to view your popup advertisements.

Statistics for one domain which uses CPM popup advertisements.

Page Views:	129712
PopUps Loaded:	1645
Successful PopUp %	1.27
CPM $$	25 cents per 1,000
Total	$0.41

With these live statistics, it shows less than 1.5% of all web visitors will view popup advertisements. Given the above figures (assuming percentage is constant), to earn:

$10.00 month - 3,149,607 page views
$20.00 month - 6,299,214 page views
$50.00 month - 15,748,032 page views

In closing, using typical advertisment methods, you would need a web site that achieves 25,826,790 hits just to make $100.00 off CPM advertisments every month. These are page views, not hits. The typical web site doesn't come close to delivering this much traffic making it nearly impossible to build a suitable income off website advertising.

Prevent web bots from stealing images

Recently, I relaunched a web site that is primarily image based (approximately 95% images, 1% text, 4% aside for YaBB forum) and as traffic exploded, so did the number of unauthorized web bots scraping my site for images.

Almost overnight, my traffic doubled, then tripped, and then some. Before I knew it, I had many gigabytes of bandwidth eaten up every single day and this became a huge problem. My reseller package allows 5gb storage and 25gb bandwidth, at the bandwidth usage my site was using I was sure going to get nailed with overage charges at the end of the month.

The solutions at first didn’t seem like they would help, but after almost two weeks of doing research and coming up with ideas, here are the courses of action I’ve taken in order to prevent much of the bandwidth thieves.


1) Turn off hotlinking for all image types.

I had this on originally, but if your Cpanel isn’t set up to block other sites from hotlinking, you could be a victim to a thief. In your Cpanel, enable hotlink filtering and add your sites accordingly.


2) Set up a bot trap URL

This idea came to me after reading numerous articles on preventing web bots. By setting up random links across a web site that link to a trap, you can catch web bots in action and thus block their IP address temporarily. There are two things to make sure when you create a bot trap.

When building the links to send bots to your bot trap, they have to be something web visitors will know not to click. In my case, on my main page I informed web visitors not to press any link that has either a color or an animal name in the link text. (Ie: blue fox, red orange, alligator). Since my site has no real content that use colors or animals, anyone who clicks these links is obviously a web bot. When they click the link, my server side script records and blocks their IP.

You need to make sure to change your links and link text regularily or web bots can be programmed to skip them. The links should also be moved around your web site as bots and skip specific sections. If you leave it there long enough, the bots will know enough not to follow those links.

The second thing to remember is to block users temporarily. IP addresses change, for some users it changes every time they connect. By blocking an IP address permanently, you could be blocking a legit visitor two weeks from now. I set my ban at 1 hour and when they try to load my site while banned, it informs them of the ban and shows them how long they have left before they can access the site again. That way if a legit web visitor gets caught in the trap, they know they will be able to return shortly.

The downside of this is search engines may follow these links and get banned as well. You can setup a robots.txt file to instruct legit bots not to follow these links.


3) Setup a robots.txt file

Most web sites have this already to help with search engine bots behave when indexing. This can also be used to tell bots what pages not to index, like pages that are primarily images.
Most unauthorized web bots (or script kiddies) will not respect the robots.txt file, making this attempt and limiting your image scrapers less than a success.


4) Check IP ranges

From my experience, when web bots scrape your web site they use the same IP range with the last octet unique. I set up a small script that recorded every visit to my site and the timestamp from their last access. If two or more connections from the same IP range (but separate IP address) appear in the same 2 minute period of time, I block the entire range for 1 hour.

Web visitors will not be using proxies to visit your site, so this is a pretty secure way of locating and blocking web bots. There is a downside to this method of blocking bots, as well. Search engine bots generally use proxies when sending their web crawlers to your web site. If you block the IP range of a search engine, your web site will drop in search engine rankings pretty quickly.

So what can be done to prevent you from blocking a legit web bot? If you monitor the UserAgent of the bot and check whether they requested access to the robots.txt page, you can be pretty certain whether or not they are legitly travelling through your web site.

All engine bots will request your robots.txt file. If the bot doesn’t, they have no business being there and it’s okay for you to block.


5) Convert images to non-bot format

My newest attempt at blocking web bots from scraping is converting my images dynamically to a format not stealable by web bots. After doing some research, there are a few modules for both Perl and PHP that allows us to convert Bitmaps to SWF format on the fly.
SWF::File, SWF::Builder and MING are available to convert to SWF. You can search Google for more information on this.

In short, you create a viewer.swf file that opens up images dynamically and present them as a SWF file on the page. More bandwidth is used and more processing is required, but after the first few initial attempts at scraping your web site, script kiddies will likely stop attemping to steal your images.

I have not had time to implement this yet, in fact I am still working on getting the initial script to work. I believe this is the best method to prevent web bots from stealing all your image-based content. Once they see they cannot do it, they’ll leave. With our speedy Perl and PHP processing, converting Bitmaps to SWF at the blink of an eye will not make the site less appealing to real web visitors.

Below is the example of the code I have been working on since last night.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use CGI::Carp qw(fatalsToBrowser);
use lib “/home/everyday/public_html/lib”;
use SWF::Builder;
my $movie = SWF::Builder->new ( FrameRate => 15, FrameSize => [15, 15, 400, 400], BackgroundColor => ‘ffffff’ );
my $jpeg = $movie->new_jpeg(’/home/user/public_html/pictures/100.jpg’);
$jpeg->place;
$movie->save(’test.swf’);

There is no 100% way to prevent web scrapers from happening, what you can do is take a few necessary procedures and stop most of them in their tracks. After a few failed attempts, they will most likely move on to some other person’s web site.

I hope my experience has helped others in saving their costly bandwidth.