Bannage standards? Ze?

[Magpie]

What happened here was a swicheroo that websites are frequently applying to prevent and/or punish bandwidth theft from people direct-linking to their images. Direct linking (like most everyone does here when they post an image that isn't being hosted by their OWN server or saved to their OWN image hosting site before posting it here) costs site owner's money, copyright infrindgement, big headaches and can cause the site's web hosting service to even shut the site down (direct linking is usually a violation of the host's Terms of Service agreemen).

Many people think everything on the internet is free and theirs for the taking... or in the case of most linkers here, they think they are just innocently borrowing. When you're a site owner and you're paying cold hard cash for the wanted traffic to your site, you're not too keen on the idea of paying for the traffic that's caused by unwanted direct linking.

In an attempt to prevent this, site owners can modify their HTACCESS file to add a redirect, so that anyone attempting to link to their content (in this case, the image Coffee intended to post) gets redirected to the page of their choice (big butt image). Of couse the person (Coffee) who's doing the direct linking thinks they're posting an image of a cute bunny or whatever, until they go back and view their post and find a "This person was attempting to steal my bandwidth!" type message or offending image in place of the intended "bunny". I didn't even have to see the offending image and I knew this is what's happened... I've seen the pic before when I tryed to right-click/save an image off a site and they too had emplyoed this lovey shot as their "hey, get your own pix" precaution. It must be a popular image to use for it' shocking qualities

Just one more good reason to host your own images... besides as Trish mentioned, it can be done for free now.