LOL, JD is the other site owner and I doubt that I will be educating him anytime soon.

I would have to disagree that his statement that you reference is "encouraging" hotlinking. He provides an example that references an internal file on our site. Then he shows how BBCode works.

Implying that he is doing something wrong is surprising to me. I think it is certainly a reach and a jump to a conclusion which is inaccurate.

There are entire services like fapomatic built up around the practice of hosting images so that they can be linked to from forums such as ours.

If anyone needs help learning how to prevent hotlinking, please let me know and I'll be happy to show you how to do it. Otherwise the next thing you know... google will have spidered all your content and made it available for free. Google image bot is the one you should really be checking up on.