In your case you'll want to stick to the legacy syntax.
Or you can put the match part in the matchtext rather than have a catchall matchtext event. That way the event won't even trigger.
It is indeed a little odd that you can only *disable* hotlinking, but can't *enable* it. Enabling is only done by the existence of the event, rather than an explicit command. I would have liked to see the /hotlink command used to enable/disable linking, but that would have broken the old style syntax.
