Peacefully
Little Disney Girl
- Joined
- May 28, 2006
Lately with all the image threads I've noticed a lot of hotlinking. And when people tell people how to post images from another site, a lot of the time they tell them how to hotlink. This is bad. Or at least it can be.
Hotlinking, basically, is seeing an image, viewing properties on it, copying the web address of the image, and using coding or a link to post it somewhere else. This may seem very innocent and easy, but it can be very bad. Especially if you don't know or trust the site you got it from.
What you're doing is using the place the original image poster used to post your image somewhere. Their internet site. This means they have complete control over what your image is. They could replace it with anything, and there are sites out there that will replace it with very bad things that I can't even mention here, but that would definitely get you banned from where ever you posted that image.
Okay, say I posted an image named mickeydance.gif here. Then someone viewed properties, copied the address, and posted it somewhere like their sig or another site. I could very easily delete the original file, take a picture of... say my daughter or something, name that mickeydance.gif and put it in the original images place. Now where ever you posted this mickeydance picture will now have a picture of my daughter in it's place. You didn't want to post a picture of my daughter, but I was mean and changed it on you. But technically, you were unintentionally mean to me first by hotlinking, as you will see below.
There are reasons people will change the image on you. The main reason is because you are essentially stealing from them. See, most webhosts require that you pay for bandwidth, which is the number of times the image can be viewed online. If it gets viewed too much, your images break or you have to pay more. You usually have a limited amount of this bandwidth.
So if you take an image that's on someone's webspace and post it somewhere else, you're making the image be viewed a lot more than the original website owner meant it to be, so you're stealing their bandwidth and their money that they spent on it. So to get you back, many sites will replace your image with something bad.
Hotlinking from something like the main yahoo site probably wouldn't do much. But if it's a random image you found on google image search hotlinking can be very risky, not to mention rude.
There are very easy ways around hotlinking. If you get your own photobucket.com account, or just use imageshack.us (which doesn't require registration), both are free to use, you're not stealing anyone's bandwidth and they have no control over what you post. You just download the image to your computer and then upload it to one of these free webhosts. Most will even provide you with the web address (and in some cases even the coding you'd need to post it somewhere), so it's very easy to copy and paste it.
I really hope this helps people in preventing hotlinking and preventing the risk of posting something you really didn't want to. I am not accusing anyone or yelling at anyone, but I figured a little information on the workings of the internet never hurt anyone, and it might help keep it from happening in the future.
I hope this post was okay here. I posted it here because this is where it's been going on.
Hotlinking, basically, is seeing an image, viewing properties on it, copying the web address of the image, and using coding or a link to post it somewhere else. This may seem very innocent and easy, but it can be very bad. Especially if you don't know or trust the site you got it from.
What you're doing is using the place the original image poster used to post your image somewhere. Their internet site. This means they have complete control over what your image is. They could replace it with anything, and there are sites out there that will replace it with very bad things that I can't even mention here, but that would definitely get you banned from where ever you posted that image.
Okay, say I posted an image named mickeydance.gif here. Then someone viewed properties, copied the address, and posted it somewhere like their sig or another site. I could very easily delete the original file, take a picture of... say my daughter or something, name that mickeydance.gif and put it in the original images place. Now where ever you posted this mickeydance picture will now have a picture of my daughter in it's place. You didn't want to post a picture of my daughter, but I was mean and changed it on you. But technically, you were unintentionally mean to me first by hotlinking, as you will see below.
There are reasons people will change the image on you. The main reason is because you are essentially stealing from them. See, most webhosts require that you pay for bandwidth, which is the number of times the image can be viewed online. If it gets viewed too much, your images break or you have to pay more. You usually have a limited amount of this bandwidth.
So if you take an image that's on someone's webspace and post it somewhere else, you're making the image be viewed a lot more than the original website owner meant it to be, so you're stealing their bandwidth and their money that they spent on it. So to get you back, many sites will replace your image with something bad.
Hotlinking from something like the main yahoo site probably wouldn't do much. But if it's a random image you found on google image search hotlinking can be very risky, not to mention rude.
There are very easy ways around hotlinking. If you get your own photobucket.com account, or just use imageshack.us (which doesn't require registration), both are free to use, you're not stealing anyone's bandwidth and they have no control over what you post. You just download the image to your computer and then upload it to one of these free webhosts. Most will even provide you with the web address (and in some cases even the coding you'd need to post it somewhere), so it's very easy to copy and paste it.
I really hope this helps people in preventing hotlinking and preventing the risk of posting something you really didn't want to. I am not accusing anyone or yelling at anyone, but I figured a little information on the workings of the internet never hurt anyone, and it might help keep it from happening in the future.
I hope this post was okay here. I posted it here because this is where it's been going on.
