The problem with hotlinking is it doesn't show an image on certain user's browsers for WHATEVER WACKY REASON THERE COULD BE WITH THAT PERSON'S COMPUTER SYSTEM BROWSER. And when you combine that state of being with moderator/administrator powers, you'd best have that doom song handy from Invader Zim.

So, today, within the remainder of year 2006, and some additional time beyond, hotlinking can be a bannable offense if you piss off the mod/admin who can't see your image. Multiple times.

I also think it's rather ridiculous, but let's just pretend, "What if hotlinking did become a permanent/temporary bannable offense?"

So what I don't understand is how mods are going to know what is hotlink and what is not. The way I see it, they would either ban anyone not linking images from "approved" sites (GFF, Imageshack), but then that would slap those in the face that host from their own private servers. Unless there was a script that would add the URL entered as the homepage in the users' profile, it would be a bit of extra work to make a judgment call on each and every image.

So if you are going to ban hot linking, you might as well just ban people from adding images to posts using the [img][/img] tag, that way, nobody would get mad at being singled out for having a one-off image host.

In all honesty though, I think that unless it is having a negative effect on bandwidth, or webmasters are complaining it shouldn't be a priority.

Then why not just make it a requirement to place a URL to the image path below every image posted? Granted it probably wouldn't matter either way because that can't see it, but at least they could try viewing the image directly.

So you want to ban people to prevent broken images, is that what you're saying?

At the cost of sounding like a cliche, aren't there better reasons to ban people for?