hotlinking

[Damar]

i was wondering what the forums stance was on the hotlinking of images from outside websites was. i have notice is something happening more and have always understood it to be a form of bandwidth theft and was surprise to see no guidance in the FAQ

[Mistery]

Hi Damar,

You are right that so far we have no rules for it.
It is indeed bandwidth theft, and some images can turn into nasty pics because the hosting site does want to protect their files.
I'll bring it up in moderation, and we'll discuss this topic.
Thank you for your suggestion

[Heartofthedark]

Could there be some info about hotlinking provided in the rules? Not to sure what you mean by it Do you mean using the IMG tags from an internet website is hotlinking or something else?

Edit : Ahh I see the edit Nevermind

Edit2: This is going to make it much more of a hassel to post images seeing as you will have to go and save them, upload and then every once in a while go and delete all these images because they take up memory on your computer I don't see how it could be that much of a problem considering almost every forum has the IMG tags available for use and have no problem with it

[Crimsonthread]

Nevertheless, it is theft... someone has to pay extra for the picture to be posted here. And just because something's available to use doesn't mean it's right to use it. I'm very happy to see this forum's new policy on the hotlinking. Other forums that don't have a policy on this issue may not understand that hotlinking is theft. The IMG tags are available so that we can use the links provided image hosting sites (photobucket, etc) when we upload pictures that way.

When I save/upload a picture to my computer, I always save it the same thing, so the new image I'm saving just replaces the old one and doesn't take up more space on my computer. It doesn't take much more time to do it this way (right-click, save, upload using manage attachments, done).

[Mistery]

@Heart
Please check this thread, it contains recommended image hosts, on some of them you can upload an image directly from an URL without having to save an image on your computer