Hotlinking

[High on Lullabies]

The staff have noticed several threads around the forum contain several hotlinked images.

Hotlinking, also known as "inline linking", "leeching", "piggy-backing" or "bandwidth theft" is the use of a linked object, often an imagine, from one site, by a web page belonging to a different site.

On the forum this can be best explained as use of the [img ] or [media ] tags when adding an image from another site to your post. Every time someone views the image, it "steals" bandwidth from the site you got it from. There are a few websites that explicitly allow this use of their bandwidth, for example Photobucket, Tinypic and Imageshack.

As well as being considered bad etiquette bandwidth stealing can have consequences for the website it is shared from (mostly when they have a small bandwidth allowance), the forum doesn't allow hotlinking, unless it is from a website that explicitly allows this.

We therefore request that when sharing an image from another site you refrain from using the 'media' or 'img' tags and simply post a link to the image instead. If you particularly wish to display the image rather than a link, then please upload the image to a site such as one of those listed above which allows this.

Thank you for your attention!