Hotlinking is not illegal. It is bad netiquette, and webmasters don't hotlink other webmaster's images because it uses up their bandwidth. Stealing content is illegal, regardless of whether this involves hotlinking or not. There is a world of difference between say, a forum user that posts a picture from your website, tells all his friends to visit your website, and puts a link under the image, saying that it's the best website on the internet, and some guy that displays your site "IN FRAME" with his Google ads showing above it all.
I didn't notice this thread. Made a search and my search didn't yield any results. So I started a thread regarding a wonderful free service that lets us hotlink without the bandwidth leeching issue. I won't put the thread link here coz I might get a red rep for hijacking. Even, more. I hope I won't get a red rep for doing this... (this red reps thing makes me nervous everytime I hit the 'Reply' button. I'm starting to develop 'replyphobia'
I'm so tired of this topic. Here is a guide to stop hotlinking by using htaccess. Step 1 Open .htaccess from the root directory. If the file doesn't exist, create a blank document named so then edit it. Step 2 Insert one of the two snippets of code: To display a selected image instead of the requested one: RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?domain\.com/ [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$ RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ /images/selectedimage.jpg [L] Code (markup): To display a 403 error: RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?domain\.com/ [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$ RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ - [F] Code (markup): There it goes. Now you have absolutely no excuse to whine about the leechers. Regards, George