Mousekilla,
I wasn't arguing with you
I was just pointing out that when the site that hosts a community sustains itself by offering a service, it's bad for the site when it's own forums/etc. advertise someone else's services.
Sure, it seems like a small thing, but in the 10 years I've been on the net and the 14 years before that in the BBS scene I've seen lots of good sites and bulletin boards go down because they just couldn't meet the growing requirements of the communities they supported.
ImageStation blocked images leeching for essentially the same reasons. They pay out a small fortune to serve up that many images a month, and when another site simply points to the images it costs them money, while the other site gets the traffic and possible ad revenue.
This trend of remote-blocking will increase as time goes on, and we're already starting to see more of the corporate sites require subscriptions for their services. People like free, but free still has costs for someone.
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