Why hotlinking is serious business.

[Halororor]

Never hotlink. I know every one of us feel like taking the shortcut once in a while, but don't. It can save you a ton of grief.

 

I hotlinked some lolcat pictures on a forum yesterday, not even knowing what site I'm getting them from (Google Images ftw). What I saw was cute and funny kittens. Other people saw porn. Luckily the mods had seen this type of thing before, so I got away with warning. :P

 

So, life lesson number 431: Invest that extra 30 seconds of time into posting a pic. It is the right thing to do.

[Alastair91]

Never experience that myself before but thanks for the heads up.

[bben46]

That's a favorite trick by webmasters to get back at people who steal their content or bandwidth by hotlinking content. Remember, it's easy to change what a url links to. Favorite changes are redirects to goatsee or similar sites.

[evilneko]

Or at least, link to something you have permission to link to. Like, in my case, my webhost. ;) Or your ISP-provided webspace (most US ISPs provide some webspace). Or other service that explicitly allows you to do so (imageshack etc, though I try to avoid those as they seem slow, and I have my own host!). If you use a free webspace provider (ala geocities, angelfire, etc) be sure to check the terms of service to make sure it's allowed.