Hot Linked

An item on one web-service that is requested by another web-service, usually an image. This isn't when an image is actually a potholed link; their image is displayed inline as part of your web page.

This is not only impolite (it eats up your victim's bandwidth), it's almost always a really bad idea. A Hot Linked item may have been removed by the original host (this is a big problem with YouTube links). The original host can be undergoing a performance problem. The original host may have changed its linking policy. The original host may be gone. The original host may have substituted a different (and often obscene) image for the one at that URL ... The list of possible badness goes on and on.

On the other hand, hotlinking has one advantage over making and posting a copy of the image: you're not breaking copyright law by copying the image, you're simply providing a pointer to the original. For some people, that's justification enough to hotlink.

Web forums are particularly bad for encouraging users to hotlink images from other sites (and restricting users' ability to edit their own posts later). It's not uncommon for a victim's site (such as the Uncyclopedia Babble Project at its peak in 2008-09) to incur $100/month or more in additional hosting costs due to the resulting bandwidth overages. That's the point at which a Bastard Operator From Hell may be tempted to have the webserver check the "Referer:" (sic) headers on requests and return a picture of the system administrator's backside (or worse) in place of the hotlinked images.