At present, there are so many free image hosting on the wild. Since these service providers usually earn income from advertisements, e.g., , the most scary thing for them is hot link. Hot link means to embedding the hosted image directly to other sites. As a result, there is no chance to display the advertisements. Most providers have to reduce hot links to decrease useless traffics by detecting referer.

Some webboard may not allow members to upload images as many as they want so they have to upload images to free image hosting. All images are usually posted to webboard as a set of links. If the webboard is very popular, there will be lots of useless hot link to the image hosting provider. Someday, the image hosting provider may ban all hot links with referer pointed from that webboard. After that all visitors may not be able to view those images in just a simple click because of banned referer.

I recommend you to try RefControl extension for Firefox. After installed, I added an entry "imageshack.us" with action "Block" and it works perfectly like a charm.

Tags: refcontrol, firefox