Heya! I’m seeing a lot of folks struggling with this so let me give a simple explanation.
1. You want the direct link to the image itself. The url should end with the file type such as .png or .gif otherwise it will not work
2. To obtain a direct link there are a number of websites one can use to generate one. I personally use imgbox.com but filegarden.com is also popular. I can’t recommend Imgur these days but it exists.
3. Do Not upload the image to discord and use that url. Discord clears out their image files regularly. And I think that’s technically hotlinking anyway
4. Which brings me to: if the image is already on A Website, download or copypaste it to one of the image sharing websites mentioned above. “Hotlinking” is the act of grabbing and embedding an image from elsewhere which can cause bandwidth issues for the original site. (This is why neocities has a rule against this!)
I hope you find these basics useful and if this is your first foray into forums have fun 
thanks for the pointers 👍
check me out at acetyzias.tumblr.com and acelad.crockercorp.com on bsky
just a lil bump... because this still seems to be confusing ppl....
thank you autumn for carrying the image posting community
