I believe you might have seen an image that says “Hotlink has been disabled for this domain.” that looks like the one on the left. This is very common in forums and on some websites. It is ImageShack’s way of making sure the same site is not using a huge amount of bandwidth. They monitor requests from the referrer log which is basically the header info sent whenever you request a image from site hosted on ImageShack. If they find same site using lots of bandwidth with large bandwidth consuming images, they will ban the whole domain.

I know it’s sometimes frustrating because it might be the image or picture that you’re looking for and you can’t see it! Don’t worry, here’s a guide on how to bypass this ban to view ImageShack hotlink image.


For Firefox browser
1. Type about:config in the address bar. Settings will appear.
2. Then type network.http.sendRefererHeader in the Filter bar.
3. Use your mouse to double click on the network.http.sendRefererHeader and change the value to 0.

Basically, network.http.sendRefererHeader controls the referrer header which enables webmasters to know from where the traffic to their site is coming from. By default this is enabled in firefox. Make sure you set it back to “2″ when you’re done viewing the banned ImageShack images because some websites will not work properly.

For Opera browser
1. Press F12 key.
2. Uncheck “Enable referrer logging”

Also, remember to check Enable referrer logging once you’ve viewed the banned images from ImageShack.

For Internet Explorer
Unfortunately, you can’t disable the referrer logging in Internet Explorer and you have to use third party tools to do it. My advice is, ditch Internet Explorer and start using Firefox.

One final tip, make sure you REFRESH or RELOAD the page in order for the banned images to appear. Otherwise you’ll still be seeing the cached image that says “Hotlink has been disabled for this domain”