Hotlink Protection Engaged

You don't know what I am talking about? OK, here is a little background. Bandwidth theft or "hotlinking" is direct linking to a web site's files (images, video, etc.) so it will appear on your own site, eBay auction listing, weblog, forum message post, etc. as if it were your own.

Instead of having src="theimageonmysite.jpg" you have it like this: src="http://www.thisisnotmysite.com/theimage.jpg". This is not good.

There are several reasons that you shouldn't do this.
#1 - Hotlinking uses someone else's bandwidth to serve up the image on your page. This is bad form.
#2 - If all of your images on your site are from other websites it will take longer for your site to load. This too is bad form
#3 - The person you are hot linking to can take down the image or switch it with another image that is named the same thing. For example. This is the image that has been getting leeched on.



I COULD take this image called "sad-puppy-762578.JPG" and replace it with a file that is named the same but is a really naughty image or something that's really disgusting. AND, given the amount of people linking to this, it would take quite a while for everyone using it to realize what happened. However, since I am a nice guy and this would be bad form on MY part, I opted for a different route.

Yesterday I had to turn on my "hotlink protection." This prevents the aforementioned bandwidth theft. It's sad that I had to resort to this. The users over at Jappy.de ruined it for everyone by leeching my bandwidth. I was playing nice until, literally, 100's of people from Jappy.de started hotlinking to images on my blog. I had more hits from Jappy.de/whatevertheprofilewas than I could count.

If you had a link to an image or video hosted on my site and you are a "friend" let me know and I will allow you as a friendly site. I like to play nice, I really do. Do you still love me?