About Hotlinking to/from other web sites.

Mariah

First what is it?  I have copied this description from https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotlinking

Hotlinking is an internet term. It means displaying an image on a website by linking to the website hosting the image. The link gets the source data of the picture each time it is needed.

This avoids having the image on every website which uses it. So, a website owner uses a link to the picture such as http : //example. com/picture.jpg. When the hotlinking website is loaded, the image is loaded from the original website, which uses its bandwidth, so it costs the hotlinked website money.

Why am I making this post?

While I realise Stratics may have a wider range of emoticons than can be found here, it's really rather rude to steal their bandwidth to drag them here. Please don't do it.

Mariah

I refresh this thread to once again ask people not to hotlink to other sites.

Principle victims of this theft are Stratics, from which people have hotlinked signatures and emojies, and uoguide. It is perfectly fine to post urls that send people to either of those sites (except if the link is to a forum thread which breaks our ToS) but not to drag their images here.

If you must use an image from one of those sites save it to your pc and upload it to our server, with a note to acknowledge the source.

Thank you