Protecting Forum Images from Hot linking

[UKBusinessLive]

Hi All

Is there a way to protect forum images to prevent people copying them elsewhere via hotlinking?? Just noticed a few of on my forum have been linked this way, adds to my bandwidth too

Watermarking is an idea but that won't stop people 100%, and we all know that the "no right click hack can be bypassed".

Would be nice to come up with an idea that would benefit Forum Owners, and prevent their images from being hotlinked like this. I know people will always copy images and pictures, But Hotlinking can use up a lot of your bandwidth.

For other sites, however, it's a much bigger problem. If a 100K JPEG is hotlinked on a site that gets, say, 1,000 hits a day, that?s 100MB of data transferred from your site without a single person actually visiting your site. If you have only a few gigabytes of transfer available per month ? or worse, pay money per gigabyte ? this can add up. And if someone were to leech an entire gallery from your site ?

I wonder what do artwork and graphic forums do to prevent this??

In my case, i have deleted the two images