I don't really blame most of the people that are doing this, because many of them just don't know what they're doing. Hell, many of them are just cutting and pasting code without knowing what it does because they want a cool looking profile. They get bad advice from places like this that pretty much tell you to steal other people's bandwidth to funkify those MySpace profiles. Really, these people are setting you up to look like a joke when the site owner finds out and replaces your image with something really embarrasing (and potentially goat-related).

After moving to Dreamhost, I've been able to do some trickery to keep people from hotlinking my files. Actually, what it does is replace whatever graphic they're trying to steal with a picture of the little elf thief from Golden Axe. So what's the big deal? That little elf's file size is only 1.16 KB while the stuff that people are trying to yank from the site can be, well, a lot larger than that especially if it's animated. Here's the funny part: the person that's lifting it has the image in their web cache and they'll still see that image until they clean out that cache. Everyone else sees the elf. Here's a possible example of how this can be funny.

The hotlinker thinks they're posting this:

But everyone else sees this:

I get website traffic reports about what files are being accessed and where they appear. That means I get to look at the pages that people are trying to hotlink. I'm telling you, I've seen hilarious stuff like that up there more times than you'll even know and it never stops making me laugh. I feel a bit sorry for some of the people doing it because some don't really know what the big deal is about hotlinking. But until I hit the lotto and can buy my own massive server for everyone to leech from, the elf will remain on duty. So let's revist our friend MegaSaiyanSephiroth to see how he's doing these days:

MegaSaiyanSephiroth Posts: 8910123 User-Level: Buttmunch PM E-Mail	RE: Old-school Devil May Cry devil may cry aint even old school. Tomb Raider is old school and so is final fantasy 7. U dont no s*** about vidio games dude. dont even try to act like u no as much as i do. say hello to my little friends lol!!!!1!!1!
Agent GameSmith Posts: 19xx User-Level: Trojan PM E-Mail	RE: Old-school Devil May Cry **looks at av and sig** You must like Golden Axe, too. A lot, actually. o_O Thank you for playing.
MegaSaiyanSephiroth Posts: 8910124 User-Level: Buttmunch PM E-Mail	RE: Old-school Devil May Cry no, thats is 4 old people. wtf are u talking about. im rollin with marvel characters in my av and sig while you got that marvel versis capcom guy. stop hatin. say hello to my little friends lol!!!!1!!1!
Agent GameSmith Posts: 19xx User-Level: Trojan PM E-Mail	RE: Old-school Devil May Cry No, you're rollin' with elves, you f***ing moron. Look at your sig and avatar. Earth Wind and Fire! Back to the Shire! edit: They're using some .htaccess-fu on you. You see the images from the website in your cache because you haven't cleaned it out. You know, because you're an idiot. Meanwhile, everybody's gawking at your stupid Elf-day parade. Please don't come back until you've learned how to properly use teh intarwebs. KTHNX. Thank you for playing.
MegaSaiyanSephiroth Posts: 8910125 User-Level: Buttmunch PM E-Mail	RE: Old-school Devil May Cry wtf? that place is all g** and green and s***. I hate that scrollboss guy anyway. edit: aw man whered all my boss sprites go? somebodys hacking my account! say hello to my little friends lol!!!!1!!1!

While those are some fictional examples, they're based on a few cases I've seen when going through my website reports. If I had the money, I'd love to let everybody hotlink from me and do crazy stuff with sprites. Unfortunately, I don't make a lot of money and hosting my sites is more of a hobby thing that I spend about $9 bucks a month for. Please do us both a favor and get a free image hosting account from a place like Photobucket to host your stuff on. I plan to start adding things like downloadable videos and Beats of Rage MODs, I'll need all the bandwidth I can get. I'd rather have that bandwidth go to the people that are nice enough to visit the site than to hotlinkers. And that's the facts, Jack. Good night and have a pleasant tomorrow. And for those of you who need to combat hotlinking, here are some useful links:

HTML Basix: htaccess code generator - This is what I used to create 'elfin magic' with my site's files.

disclaimer: MegaSaiyanSephiroth was a randomly made name that uses incredibly common webnames and is not meant to represent any actual person.