IMPORTANT: ALL members please read

[BellyBelly]

Dear members,

It has come to our attention that several BellyBelly members are linking images from the BellyBelly forums to several other website forums. These are the smilies or icons you can add to pictures. We strongly ask you to refrain from doing so, as this creates extra traffic/load/bandwidth to our website (as a website we have to pay for bandwidth to run the site), especially in the amounts of images currently being used, it really does add up - and we can't afford to let everyone use up our own bandwidth for their personal use, when we use enough bandwidth already - we have a custom made plan with our host we use that much!!!

We have renamed some files in order to stop this from occuring and replaced old ones with warning messages and images.

We ask that you please respect the BellyBelly website and the other members doing the right thing who deserve to have a website running at best speed possible and at best capacity.

I understand that some of you may not realise this is the case, but please do ensure the images are immediately removed as we'll be renaming all images shortly. If this problem continues, we'll immediately place a script on our server so that no file requests whatsoever can be made by these certain websites, for any files at all.

Anyone found to deliberately be signing up in order to use these smilies or continuing to use them after this date risk warnings or being banned.

Thank-you for your attention.

[BellyBelly]

Post updated - please read as this is still happening but in larger numbers. I am currently discussing with the developer on ways we can change some code in the site to stop people linking pictures and smilies from our site (called hotlinking or leaching). Hopefully this wont effect any genuine linking for other reasons, however at this stage with so many people linking our images to their sites, it's something I am willing to have done.