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Why have all your images turned into something saying 'Hotlinking is naughty'?
After analysis of our logs, we noticed a large amount of traffic was wasted on people hotlinking to our images from message boards and blogs without permission or credit. To discourage this bandwidth theft, we put in place a protection system. Unfortunately for a small number of people their firewall's overzealous privacy settings trip over this, most commonly Norton Internet Security / Personal Firewall products.
How can I fix this?
It varies between products, but will be something similar to this procedure for Norton Internet Security 2004
Open NIS
Click on Privacy control, then click on Configure
Click on Advanced
Click on Add Site
Enter "www.theoneliner.com" - The www. portion may already be filled for you
It ought to be automatically highlighted. If not, find www.theoneliner.com in the list
Uncheck the default settings option for "information about your browser" and "Information about visited sites", and set these both to permit.
Click on OK.
Why should I bother? Your fault, isn't it?
True. However, there's always a risk of 'collateral damage' when putting these restrictions in place, and it was getting to a point where the costs of not having it would have shut the site down. Also, I think these firewall defaults are far too Draconian. The so-called personal information it blocks amounts to what page you're currently on and what browser you're using. These statistics have been useful for years for webmasters to know what advanced features can be used without upsetting too many older browser users and to gauge popularity of pages, the very common and vital use of hotlink protection aside. We apologise profusely for the inconvenience caused and hope you'll go to the trouble of allowing our site access to these nuggets of information, and of course as per our privacy policy this information will never be revealed to any third party. I suspect you may have this problem at quite a few sites, as there's no workaround as far as I can see. If we receive sufficient complaints we may rethink this policy.