Seibertron wrote:Hotlinking an image is not poor etiquette.
Actually, hotlinking is, honestly, very poor etiquette, unless you know for 100% certain beforehand the person is all right with it. Not all pay servers allow lots of bandwidth, so anytime you hotlink you're risking that webmaster possibly having to pay out lots of money. Sure, they can contact you and have you take it down, but they're still out all that bandwidth before that happens. (There's a host of other reasons on top of that why it's bad as well.)
Do a search on the matter, and you'll see that pretty much everyone agrees that hotlinking is a big no-no.
I do think it would have been better if we had handled it politely (and I tried to), but your default assumption should always, always be to not hotlink, not the other way around.
Seibertron wrote:That's what the images are there for ... and I've never given tfwiki a hard time for using a large number of images from this site before either.
Difference being, when we use images from your site, we always host them ourselves by uploading them to our own server.
As for why I contacted MKall, it's because it was he who posted the news article, so I thought it made sense to contact him to edit the single article rather than bothering an admin about what seemed like a relatively trivial matter that could be handled by a moderator.