If you cut and paste this link into your browser, it will work, if you just click the link in the SDMB post, it won’t work.
http://www.angelfire.com/my/graham/car5.jpg
What’s up?
Angelfire doesn’t allow offsite linking. It’s to keep people from stealing their bandwidth.
This is by design. Angelfire, and a lot of other websites, use this technique to conserve bandwidth. It’s not specific to linking from the SDMB.
The rationale being that they don’t want you to host images on their servers and call it from another website, because that way they can’t serve their ads and earn revenue from the bandwidth you are using off them. If you were calling the image from a page hosted on their server, they could have shown you their ads.
Other commercial and personal websites also use this technique to save on bandwidth, because they don’t want you to link to their images and use their bandwidth for no benefit to them.
The practice (of linking directly to images) is known as Hotlinking:
I clicked on the link in your post and it worked.
That’s odd, so it works for some people? Or maybe just certain times of day?
I clicked on your link and it DOESN’T work. Not for me, at least.
If you have seen that image before, it may reload from the cache when you click on the posted link, rather than trying to get it off the server again.
Now that I have viewed the image by cut and pasting the link into the address bar, just clicking on it works for me too.