Why Hotlinking is a Bad Idea

It’s never a good idea to hotlink someone’s  image by putting an embedded image in your own blog or website.  That’s especially true these days with so many free hosting sites and hosting so cheap to begin with.   Still someone got lazy and apparently found an image I had up.   It was only a tiny image that was actually downscaled from an Associated Press story.

There’s another issue with hotlinking images.  When someone else runs the server, they can find out when there’s traffic coming from an image like that.  They can also change the image if they want, since it’s their hosting account.

Here, an assclown decided to use the little image I had in a post while posting some anti-science propaganda against modern agriculture.

It looked something like this:

But I fixed it

I wonder how long until he notices?

Yes, I was tempted to put something dirty there, but I didn’t.   I still might change it up and put something more insulting or humorous.

This is why you should not hotlink images.   It really doesn’t bother me much that a tiny amount of bandwidth got used for this image, but the fact that it gave this opportunity couldn’t be missed.

However, if you do want to hotlink an image you see on this site in order to promote something on this site or some other important concept, such as on a forum or board, that’s not really going to bother me, as I do know many of those sites don’t have their own built in hosting and if you don’t have  server, it can be cumbersome to find a place to post it.   Just as long as it’s not using an exorbitant amount of bandwidth, I don’t care that much.    Unless, of course, it’s in support of something I completely disagree with (like opposition to genetically modified foods) because in that case I’ll probably exercise my right to change it and make you look like a fool.