Your web server is giving a 403
Forbidden response to requests that
include a referer, which includes
(in most web browsers) requests for images in
elements. This can
probably be configured somewhere on your web server. You may currently have
something like
this
enabled and you’ll need to disable it.
(A reason someone might want this behavior is to prevent
hotlinking, but in this case,
you want to hotlink your own image.)
The reason that the behavior is intermittent is presumably caching on your
browser. When I tested it from the command
line the behavior seemed quite consistent.
I blame browser caching. In the process of testing I made several dozen requests without a Referer and all of them were 200 OK (and in the case of a couple dozen of those I double-checked that the file contents were identical with each other).
Edit: Actually, you can test this if your Apache install is set to log Referers to your access log (this is a common default). If so, you’ll probably find that the 403 lines have Referers and the 200 lines don’t. (You may also see some 304 Not Modified responses there, which would probably be either all without Referers or maybe a mixture.)
Your web server is giving a 403 Forbidden response to requests that include a referer, which includes (in most web browsers) requests for images in
(A reason someone might want this behavior is to prevent hotlinking, but in this case, you want to hotlink your own image.)
The reason that the behavior is intermittent is presumably caching on your browser. When I tested it from the command line the behavior seemed quite consistent.
That is probably it. It doesn’t explain the direct links failing though.
I blame browser caching. In the process of testing I made several dozen requests without a Referer and all of them were 200 OK (and in the case of a couple dozen of those I double-checked that the file contents were identical with each other).
Edit: Actually, you can test this if your Apache install is set to log Referers to your access log (this is a common default). If so, you’ll probably find that the 403 lines have Referers and the 200 lines don’t. (You may also see some 304 Not Modified responses there, which would probably be either all without Referers or maybe a mixture.)
Well, clicking on the links and then reloading doesn’t work.