Another dumb question

Many sites do not want you to "hotlink" their images, as they have to pay for the bandwidth so they take measures to prevent it.

I've heard that, Robert, but why can I see them when others cannot? I'm speaking about my poem thread and Reyn's picture thread.

Because the photo is in your cache from when you visited it on their site. When you post it here it's loading from your own computer for you, but for others who haven't already cached it the photo is blocked by the originating servers.

Well, that's something new to me. Used to be, if the pic was forbidden it would say: "No right clicking allowed"

Guess I won't know which one will work and which one won't. Thanks for the explanation, however.

Yeah, the only easy way to tell is to disable or clear your cache between collecting and posting the photo.

Alternately you can "transload" (upload to image host from the other url) the photo to an image host that allows for hotlinking. Many sites aren't setup to handle indefinite image hosting so that is usually a safer bet to get it to work.

I'll have to learn to do that, I guess. Now for another dumb question. Why would anyone thumb this down?

I knew I should have avoided this thread.

Why is that? I deleted the history on Google, but I don't know how to do it on Foxfyre. Aren't history and cache the same thing?

Why I was wary of joining the thread? Because I'd like to be able to use the site without site questions being sprung on me (which is more like work than having fun here most of the time) on threads that aren't about the site. And also because I don't know if I can answer the voting question any better than the last couple dozen times I have (not all to you of course) so I feel like a broken record. Also, I think sometimes it's not really a question, but a complaint that isn't ever going to go away. So it feels like being nagged.

But as to the tech part of your question:

"History" is a list of urls you have visited. Your browser "cache" is a collection of files (images, etc) so that you don't have to download them again.

Clearing your cache to check every time would be a bit cumbersome and make your browsing slower. I tend to use a plugin (web developer toolbar, which I don't really recommend for non-developers) that allows me to temporarily disable the cache but the easiest solution for you is to use something like imageshack's transloading. If you already know how to use imageshack uploading it's just as easy. Choose their "URL" option and just paste the url that you would have posted here there, and they'll get the image and store it and provide you a new url to post.

Letty, this would be the same type of option as using the Photobucket site that I mentioned to you earlier.


Don't take the voting down thing personally. Folks vote things down (or away) for different reasons.

It can be because they've already read it, or have no interest in the topic. When they "vote it down", it clears the topic away from their list.

There's no maliciousness here.

I think that might be more complicated for this kind of use case, with the image hosts like imageshack:

1) You don't have to log in.
2) You don't have to download the image then upload it, just provide the url and they get it directly.
3) You don't have limits on how much you can upload or how much the file can be viewed (many photobucket images become unavailable on popular threads of ours like the funny signs one).

Photobucket, flickr etc are good sites for your own pictures but not what I'd recommend for hosting a picture you just want to post on a forum once.

It might help to have a FAQ page as an option at the top or the bottom of the page - 1 page with short answers instead of questions all over the site that people have to find to see if the question has been asked already.

Thank you for that Robert. I will keep Imageshack in mind.