Well. Hrm. My community members loooooooooooooove google images, and they love posting pics that illustrate all sorts of things.

We've recently gotten a politely-worded yet angry request to remove a hotlinked photo, and that has us thinking about the overall photo posting habits of just about all our posters, and we're thinking it's time to do something.

But WHAT??? We're talking behaviour modification, here. We don't want to turn off the ability to post pics from remote sites as a lot of our members do use pics from their own web-pic-hosters. How on earth do we deal with the ones that are hotlinking? This has us a bit flummoxed. We're not even sure where to start. A board email? Sticky topic? Is that enough?

Suggestions? Anyone?

Tell the owner of the photos to add a .htaccess file exception to secure their images directrory, it'll save them hassle and theres nothing you need to update.

You can find an example at:
http://www.ubbdev.com/ubb/ultimatebb.php/topic/10/2368.html#000000
http://www.ubbdev.com/ubbcgi/ultimatebb.cgi/topic/8/3089.html?#000005

By providing external sites a way of blocking hotlinking of their images they can in essance fix the problem at it's root; just explain that "due to the real time nature of bulletin boards there is no plausable way to monitor everything posted by every user through any post"...

In addition to the recommendation above, I would post a sticky topic explaining why hotlinking is not a good thing, and stating that hotlinkers will be put in "time-out" for a period of time, repeat hotlinkers will be banned. Then do some enforcement.

That should clear up the problem quickly...I think a lot of folks out there don't even realize that hotlinking is frowned upon, particularly people who haven't owned websites of their own. Once you bring it to their attention, they should be fine.