Alden Bates' Weblog

I've ranted on about hotlinking images on my site before. I find it rude because they're using my bandwidth to decorate their own site with pretty images. Although I've put some measure of protection on, sometimes people will try it and not bother to remove the link when it doesn't work. I thought it might be useful to list the top 5 hotlinked images:

	The V for Vendetta comic image from the Comic Connection article from TSV 26, for obvious reasons.
	A convention photo of Tobey Maguire, predating the release of Spider-Man.
	The Greg the Bunny icons, particularly the ones of Tardy and Count Blah.
	Turdy, the alien from The Outer Limits. I'm still not sure what Turdy's appeal is. Maybe it's his smile.
	Thing, from The Tomorrow People.
	An old Dead Can Dance image. Just a picture of some arched windows which I no longer use on my music site - the one currently gracing the DCD page is a DVD screenshot.

I believe the most effective way to prevent undesired image hotlinking is to prevent Google Image search from indexing the pictures on a site; The vast majority of hotlinkers find the images via Google image search.

As a side note, myspace recently added a mechanism for reporting offensive images - there's a link at the bottom of each profile page - so it may be that the most effective way to deal with myspace hotlinkers is to redirect the image to a copy of tubgirl or similar, then report it. I do notice that hotlinking from myspace appears to have reduced drastically on my site since they've introduced this.