Stealing bandwidth from other sites....

[FlyingFrog]

I've added a new rule about the use of images in posts today:

10. Please do not add pictures in your posts that are not located on your server(s) or servers you are allowed to use. Images from official sources are ok (www.mil.something etc.), as long as you add a link/source to that site.
If you want to use images from other sources then please link to them only, bandwidth theft is not a nice thing!
http://www.military-quotes.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3

By linking directly to images on other servers we "steal" their bandwidth, and that's not very nice..

Actually the message is clear.

Just wonder what has it to do with This Forum the images are simply fetched from other websites and sent to viewer's browser, nothing to do with This Forum, "stealing" other's bandwidth? Other web servers don't mind at all, they even like you to upload unlimited images to their servers.

Well, webmasters normally don't ask forum members opinions, that's the poor reality.

Admin edit: I've split these two from the military picture thread

 

[Redleg]

Actually the message is clear.

Just wonder what has it to do with This Forum the images are simply fetched from other websites and sent to viewer's browser, nothing to do with This Forum, "stealing" other's bandwidth? Other web servers don't mind at all, they even like you to upload unlimited images to their servers.

Well, webmasters normally don't ask forum members opinions, that's the poor reality.

It is actually defined as "bandwidth theft" to use other sites images without their approval.

All sites have to pay for their bandwidth (how many gigabytes of data sent to the visitors pr month/day).

I have disallowed others from displaying images from my server on their sites, since I've had some real problems with it in the past.
One example was a guy on military.com that used a couple of images from my site in his forum signature there, and he was an active poster and the images were downloaded from my server thousands of times every day.
This did actually eat several gigabytes of my monthly quota of 40 gigabytes, so I had to pay for the images he displayed..

That's why it's not very nice to display images from other sites here, without their permission.
Official sites does normally not have any limitations on their bandwidth, but most of the private and smaller sites does.
(usually from 20-40 gigabytes pr month)