Harry - 11:37 am on May 29, 2004 (gmt 0)

I've had a lot of fun replacing hotlinked pictures with porn. Last time I did, I went crazy and made a composite of several big pictures.

I screwed up the layout of a forum and the pictures and the user's account were banned quickly.

The moderator asked me to warn him the next time. I told him to add a hot linking policy first.

But you can't always use porn on sites. For a corporate site, I had to put a huge logo on the picture, because, I was too concerned about uploading a porn image on a site that's supposed to be as clean as possible. Could one imagine of someone found porn on our server!? A wholesome family site? Too risky.

Hotlink protection through http access doesn't work properly in all situations and adds a lot of trouble for us too. Our own firewall didn't tolerate the privacy breech and lots of honest users could not see the images on the site at all.

Then, we can't use pictures in newsletters or post them on third partes' sites, without going through configurations.

The only solution left was to put visible watermarks everywhere and hope that it was enough. Visible watermarks (advertising) doesn't seem to disuade a lot of hot linkers.