Hotlinking. The act of displaying pictures or content on your site directly from another persons webhost without their permission and stealing bandwidth in the process. This is a most uncool act which is often accompanied with blatant plagiarism of the posts or articles word for word.

It is also downright stupid.

Any newbie can save images and put it somewhere else as not to arouse suspicion that what ever you're displaying is stolen property. It takes a complete retard to actually take every single picture and display it by linking it directly from the owner's site. That's like stealing shoes from a store then selling next door to the shop you stole it from.

How catatonically moronic can you get?

You know what the sad thing is?

It happens more than you think.

So for those of you who happen to have webhosts of your own and you wouldn't want this to happen…or you found out that this happened to you, have no fear. There is a way to deal with them. However, it involves some coding and webhosts that has something called Mod Rewrite which is found in Apache run servers.

I'll try to keep this as simple as possible so here goes.

1. Go here
2. Read
3. Do exactly what it says

I do hope that was simple enough for you. If you're a WordPress user, this step is pretty simple enough, if you go to Admin ->Manage -> Files, you can find your htaccess file ready to edit. If your site doesn't have one, you need to create a notepad file with the commands in it and upload it into the server then rename it ".htaccess". If you got any questions on how to really do it or you can't figure out how to make heads or tails of it, you can drop by a comment here or contact me here.

But for those of you who want to know what this can really do. This is what I did with it. I took a site that was hotlinking of this post here. As you can compare…it's a direct copy.

Nasty.

Much better.

I didn't have to change the picture file names…all I had to do was edit the .htaccess file a bit and there you have it. Instant gratification. No fuss, no mess but certainly a lot of laughs.

So what are you waiting for? Protect your blog if you can. Don't let anyone else take what's rightfully your own creation…unless you took it from someone else then that would make it really stupid. But seriously. Do the right thing.

It'll be worth it.

If not for a few laughs.

Update: As this post was written, Minishorts whose posts were plagiarised and hotlinked thought it would be better to let the pictures be at the idiots blog. Her reasoning is, she has the support of people anyway which makes sense.

Update: I have also found two other blogs who have had the same problem and have dealt with the situation similarly. They can be found here and here.

Update: The site in question has been taken down already…permanently I hope. I do hope the person isn't stupid enough to do the same thing again. Then again, one can only hope.