Hotlinking
- Why am I here?
You are here because the webmaster of the page you have just visited has violated the "netiquette", linking (or displaying) an image in his page that is not hosted in his server ("hotlinking").
- What is hotlinking?
Hotlinking, direct-linking, inline linking or leeching is the placing a linked object, often an image, from one site in a web page belonging to a second site. (wikipedia)
- Why hotlinking is such a bad idea?
First, hotlinking is a bandwidth theft. The image is being shown in your web page, but the image data is served by mine (including all the costs). In case of an image or media file, the cost of bandwidth can be very high, and it is me who is paying it.
Second, usually, it is considered a copyright violation. However, in this case you are lucky, as most of the images of this website are freely usable, but the right way of doing it is making local copies, not linking to them.
Third, it is very risky. As you are linking or displaying a file that is outside of your page and not under your control, I may delete it at any time, or even change it for somthing else (which could be not very nice) and it would be automatically shown in your page. Read this story.
- Am I hot linking?
If in the source page of your website you have something like this:
<img src="http://jynus.com/..." ...>Then YOU ARE and you should stop doing it.
- How can I not "hotlink"?
It is very easy!
- Go to the original page of my website (http://jynus.com) where the image was shown. Check that you have right to use the image (my original artwork, most of other images).
- Right-click on it and choose "Save as...". Store the image in your computer.
- Upload the new image to your web server. If you can not upload images to your website, there are several pages (Flikr, ImageShack, ...) that have these kind of services.
- Change the link of the image or background to the new address.
- Add, somewhere in your page, the authoring of the image/file (a link to my home page would be appreciated).
- Why do I see a red image on my web site?
From now on, every page that abuses "hotlinking" will be automatically sended a different image:
All images will be accesible from this page.
- Hey! You have hacked my site!
Not at all. It's you who have posted my image in your site inappropriately. Read above.
- I want to know more about hotlinking
Here you have some links: