About hotlinking screencaps from my site here

[Sparky]

Real quick definition for people who don't know: "hotlinking" refers to the remote displaying of image files from one site onto another. For example the screencaps on my site are physically located on fosters-home.com, so if someone uses IMG tags to display one *directly* from my site on another site, that's called hotlinking. Hotlinking causes an unwanted load on a server's bandwidth, especially when the server's owner cannot afford to pay both the bandwidth it costs when people actually come TO the site and view an image *and* the bandwidth it costs when people go someplace *else* and view that same image. That's why hotlinking is forbidden on fosters-home.com. If you go to another forum and try to hotlink to an image on fosters-home.com without first copying it to your own computer and then uploading it elsewhere, it won't work.

Okay BUT *this* forum - look at your address bar - IS located on fosters-home.com, which means you MAY post my screencaps on this forum without copying them and reuploading them someplace else. HOWEVER. Doing so causes the same bandwidth drain as if you were able to hotlink them to any other site, because those posted pictures are going to be viewed an abnormally larger number of times than if they were just sitting quietly in their galleries linked to by a smaller-filesized thumbnail.

Bottom line: you may link to my screencaps in here, but if I notice a server drain, I will delete the images from your posts. And please do not *excessively* link to the images, such as in a "caption this picture" game thread. I would appreciate it if you linked to my images in moderation, using them in discussion threads - I plan to do this myself. At least since I own this forum and the server I will be able to more closely monitor this kind of linking than before I disabled remote hotlinking.

Thanks for reading.