REGARDING: Hotlinking images from off-site

[Whelt]

Kids, there's nothing more cool than embedding an image to share with someone you like. Everyone knows how to post images on the forum - that is, pasting the URL in the "Insert media from URL" box. However, did you consider where that URL is coming from?

Most likely it's from some random site you found on Google. Cool, no problem, you might think. However, there are two problems with hotlinking an image from any old website. First of all, half the time the image won't even show up, because the site's owner disabled hotlinking of his or her files. You might not even realize this, because the image is already saved in your cache, so it will show up for you just fine. But everybody else will only see a broken image link or a blank space. It might even be replaced with a funny "no hotlinking allowed" image, making you look like a dumb-bot!

Second, even if the image does work and everyone can see it, every view the image gets here is using bandwidth from the website that image is being linked from. In hotlinking an image, you're sapping somebody else's bandwidth, meaning they have to pay for it. And of course, .

So what do ya gotta do? Simple, there are plenty of free image hosting sites specifically made so you can upload and hotlink images without any problems, like I did with the image above. Some examples are...

http://imgur.com/
http://postimages.org/
http://puush.me/

So stay cool, host your images. Sonic Says!