After three years it was bound to happen. People hotlinking images from us is beginning to become a slight problem. Because of the bandwidth we are allotted from Dreamhost it not really a big problem, in fact its simply more of an annoyance than anything. Here’s the deal, I was looking through our server stats for the month of May and I found that 10 our of our top 50 referring sites included the likes of myspace.com and smaller forums like vhlinks.com and thebashbrothers.com. Those sites added up to 380 requests and just over 9% of our total traffic…all without a single pageview. You here that sound? Thats the image hotlinking alarm going off.

Ok. Hold it. Time out.

Lets step back a second. What is Image Hotlinking? Say I run a site called Heck Yeah Girl! .com, and I really want to use that Out of This World picture right above here. Well I could save the picture, upload it to my server and then give it it’s own link, but instead I’ll do it the easier way and get the image’s address that links to Hell Yeah Bitch! .com (right-click on it and go to properties and save that link. eg “http://hellyeahbitch.com/images/outofthisworld.jpg”) and just post that to my site. Either way the image shows up on Heck Yeah Girl! .com, but the first way is more polite and the latter, uses someone else’s bandwidth to host the picture, and is not as cool. Now this type of thing is less of an issue than it used to be, because now bandwidth is easier and cheaper to come by. Meaning I have 2 gigabytes of bandwidth a month, I can spare a few kilobytes here and there and I won’t notice a thing. However on the same token, hard drive space is also cheap and its still a bit of a party foul to go around hotlinking all of the images on your site.

Ok, so assuming I’m annoyed enough for action, what can I do about this? Well there are a few popular options. You can go technical and either write up some PHP or an .htaccess file for your apache server (both of those methods are outlined here: A List Apart | Smarter Image Hotlinking Prevention) or you can go lower-tech and replace the image that people are hotlinking with another image and make sure its named the same. For instance, if everyone is ripping off my Out of This World image above, located at http://hellyeahbitch.com/images/outofthisworld.jpg, I could take a picture of my ass, try to draw the cover of the Green Day album Dookie on it as best I could (you know, just to see how it would look) and then name that image outofthisworld.jpg and replace it with the original. So every highschool kid that had that Out of This World image in their signature of their myspace comments or their random forum post would all of a sudden see my ass art instead of Evie Garland freezing time. Now as funny as that sounds I would also have to go around and change every time I used the Out of This World image on my site because I don’t want to have my ass art appearing on a classy site such as this! …plus that solution, although funny, doesn’t really fix the problem. It just exposes my ass to the myspace world.

So what is the plan? The only option I see fit would be too start marking my images with a “Hell Yeah Bitch! .com” tag on the bottom right. But frankly I think thats ugly and I might just do nothing about the hotlinking problem. I’ll consider it my gift to the MySpace nation. Unless I have some huge image that the New York Times links too and causes me 300 MB a day, then I’ll have to. Although I don’t ever see that happening, I better go and start practicing drawing pictures on my butt in the mirror.

Oh, in case you were wondering…the most hotlinked picture on Hell Yeah Bitch! .com seems to be the image I grabbed from Conan with James Lipton doing PopoZao (pictured at the top of this article).