No More Hotlinking!
 

Hi guys!! It's come to my attention that a LOT of you are using the ScrapMatters gallery to host your images to post here. This needs to stop. Its called hotlinking (aka bandwidth theft), and its bad for SM! It makes the gallery and site lag and its basically stealing bandwidth! Please read more about what hotlinking is HERE.

The images you upload to a scrap site, should only be used on that scrap site. Not outside sites. Because you are using that site's bandwidth to view it. Instead, you need to host your own images at an image hosting site, like photobucket, imageshack or smugmug. It's free to set up an account.

You can TOTALLY make your images LINK to your credits page, you just can't use the image's URL (the one ending in .jpg) from the SM gallery, to make your photo appear in ANY thread that isn't on SM's forum. Does that make sense?

I know many of you have spent hours posting LOs in the venue threads here at MouseScrappers, so you don't need to go back and fix anything. Just from here on out, please do NOT use the SM image URLs to host your LO images. I know that none of you would purposefully do anything to hurt ScrapMatters. I know it was unintentional - just make sure to stop hotlinking from here on out. No hard feelings!! :thumbsup:

Again - making you image link or posting links to SM for credits = fine.
Using the image URL from the SM gallery (or any non-image hosting site for that matter) = not ok.

I know this isn't the most convenient thing, but it has to be done. We can't be stealing other site's bandwidth!! K?? We don't want to get ourselves in trouble AGAIN! :lol:

Thanks for your cooperation everyone!! Let me know if you have any questions!

Re: No More Hotlinking!
 

All -

I think many members here were unaware of the ramifications of doing this, and certainly never intended to break any rules (myself included). I support this measure and will enforce this to the best of my ability - I don't want any other site to force us to shut down. Please do not hotlink to other sites.

Going forward, please link from appropriate photo gallery sites (like Photobucket, SmugMug, etc).

Thanks for your understanding and cooperation.
Carol

Re: No More Hotlinking!
 

Yikes! I am totally GUILTY of this and never really thought about it... oopsie... :blush: :whistle: Thanks for bringing it to our attention!!

ETA -- Ok, I think I changed out most of mine... I will change any reamaining stragglers as I run across them...there are so many threads, I can't keep up with where all I posted... :flowers:

Re: No More Hotlinking!
 

so that would include using the hotlinked images too right? (where you just click on the image and it takes you to my gallery) as well as just the image itself??? oops....sorry.....i did that....a LOT! :blush:

Re: No More Hotlinking!
 

No no. You can make your image link to the page in your gallery at SM. That's FINE. You just need to host your own image.

So your code would look something like this:

[IMG]http://i70.photobucket.com/albums/i104/designerbrittney/
/WeHeartCaliforniaAdventure_WEB.jpg[/IMG]

The image inside the IMG tags has to be from photobucket or somewhere that YOU have hosted, not ScrapMatters, DigiShopTalk, or any other site that is not made to host images.

Make sense???

Re: No More Hotlinking!
 

Shows you how much I know! I thought it would be better to do it that way - and I had no idea it was hotlinking. Sorry! I'll make sure to do it correctly from here on out.

Re: No More Hotlinking!
 

ok, yeah, i get it.......but I was still doing it wrong, because I always upload all my images directly to SM's gallery from my harddrive......I'll have to start using photobucket more!!!

thanks for the mini-tut on hotlinking though! :idea:

Re: No More Hotlinking!
 

Likewise. I knew a lot of people did it on DIS. Seeing that others did it, I thought that was the way it should be done. I'm guessing this is the case with many people. Because other sites have the convenient "Linked image" code in their gallery, it's easy to assume that it's okay to use that code elsewhere on the internet (perhaps just swapping the img code for the source location). I'm sure many peopled just used this, thinking it was okay. But, now that we know, we should do our best not to create issues for any other sites. I went through and changed all my links last night.

Re: No More Hotlinking!
 

You can totally upload your photos to SM's gallery directly from your hard drive. That's what you're SUPPOSED to do. You just can't take that uploaded image and use it anywhere outside of SM.



I can see why people might think that!! Good point! But they put it there so its easy to grab and use for posting in THEIR threads, not other sites. KWIM??

Re: No More Hotlinking!
 

Wow! I'm guilty and I'm not using SM or any digi website. I used Britt's link about Hotlinks in her first post and learned that I should not be linking my images posted using Comcast's personal web pages.

What I've been doing is linking the image posted on my blog. What I should be doing is viewing the file as it's own webpage before adding the image here.

Thanks Britt!