I was going through my web stats for Read About Comics last night, and noticed that a lot—make that a ton—of people on MySpace are hotlinking to my images there.

Now I actually don’t mind the occasional hotlink here and there. But these are people who have gazillions of visits every day to their profile page. And in that case, come on, save the image and put it on your own webspace. (Or get some free display space like Photobucket.) So I did a little research, and eventually I figured out a way to just block specific websites from hotlinking. (I could have turned them all off entirely, but it would mess up people’s RSS feeds big time, and that just seemed like a bit of overkill.)

So for now, whenever anyone tries to link to my images on MySpace? They get this image instead. (Just in case you are at a particularly stodgy workplace, I won’t put the image there. But I promise, no nudity.)

What can I say? It makes me laugh. And really, I could have been much more evil than that. This is actually not that bad all things considered. (I rather like it.) In a month or so I’ll swap it out to just being a broken image link instead, but I figure this should get at least some people to delete the links first.

Of course, for about five hours today I’d messed it up bigtime so anything linked out of my personal account was getting swapped into this, which probably made for some very funny looking images I’d posted elsewhere… Oops!