1. Those adverts aren’t mine, they’re the file hosting providers.
2. You may not have noticed, but there’s not a single ad on this site. This site doesn’t make me a penny. It’s hosting comes out of a pool of machines I pay for out of my own pocket, not to mention it’s Amazon S3 costs and the time I spend coding it.
3. Malware? Yeah, the popups are irritating but I can’t imagine any of the hosting providers are doing anything more devious than that. Most of them are too well known to get away with it. I can’t say from experience as I’m entirely a Mac user so I don’t have to deal with any of that but I’d be surprised if it was them who were infecting your machines. I generally use Megaupload because they have the least intrusive ads, etc. Yes, they’re irritating, but they’re giving away bandwidth and storage for free, what the hell do you expect?

Anyway, sorry to be blunt, but I didn’t create this site for any reason other than to help other people get some decent sets so I don’t appreciate people turning up and bitching about having to put up with a few little inconveniences, not to mention suggesting that I’d use underhand methods like using malware. It’s also a big fucking insult to the decent people who contribute sets for the benefit of the majority of people who just download without so much as a comment to thank them.

If you want the downloads to be nice and ad free then chuck me a few hundred bucks each month and I’ll gladly host the sets too, but until I can figure out how to make the site bring in some cash we have to rely on free hosting providers, and that means putting up with their ads.

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Wasn’t like I was in a seething rage when I wrote it but just took offense at being accused of having some sort of ulterior motive and that I was using you all to try and make a quick buck.

Unfortunately with things like Youtube being everyday sites some people don’t realise that bandwidth is not free. These sites have to invest shit loads of money and run at a huge scale before they start to even pay for themselves.

Conversely some people seem to have a warped view of how people make money on the web and think that anyone can stick up a few ads and go retire to the Bahamas.

I ran ads on here for a while and at the end of the month I was just about able to buy myself a few beers.

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dont gripe about pearson towers. just go away if you are not happy. and no, most of us do not agree with you =/

OK mate, I’m up for discussing this sensibly so in the spirit of trying to make something constructive out of this I apologise for telling you to fuck off and hope we can discuss this sensibly as there is some benefit to be had from the points raised.

Re: me saying I’m a Mac user – I wasn’t saying that in a “I don’t have the problem so I don’t care” manner, rather admitting that because I use a Mac I couldn’t speak from experience and I was going on speculation that the majority of well known hosting providers we use wouldn’t get away with going as far as malware. Having read back over my post I don’t think there was any ambiguity in that.

Re: the hassle of getting rid of it, absolutely, I agree with you. I run Windows in Parallels for testing and a few other things and I managed to get some spyware on it and it was a fucking nightmare to sort out (ended up rolling back to a snapshot). If I’m honest, during my time using Windows I never had virus problems and I was quite surprised as to how I’d ended up in the situation (and how hard it was to resolve). The focus of my post however, and I if I’m honest what got to me, was your insinuation that this was directly my doing to make me money. If you didn’t mean that then my apologies, but if you look back you’ll see there was a pretty clear accusation that I was up to no good. Like I said in my last post, I don’t make any money from this site through any legitimate or underhand.

Re: the actual issue of whether I should accept that I am to blame for if the site links to somewhere that results in you getting malware on your machine – OK, this is a contentious issue. I’ll admit, I hadn’t thought of it before as you’re the first one to suggest that there’s any more of a problem than a few pop ups so based on that, and the reasons I mentioned before for me not thinking any of the big file hosters would pull that sort of stunt, I’ve not until now been concerned about it.

When you boil it down, if I’m entirely honest, no, I don’t think it’s my responsibility if it happens. I know that sounds like teflon shoulders and it’s not that I don’t care but the simple fact is that there’s no easy solution and these are the problems that all sites have to deal with when their content is driven by their users. If there were a solution then the wankers who put that stuff out there wouldn’t be in business but fact is there isn’t and they are, so it’s one of the issues we just have to deal with in order to have a site of this nature.

I do show ‘due diligence’ and make sure I try and keep tabs on things and look out for anything dodgy but I can’t check every post and the only way to tackle formally it I can think of is moderation / reporting. The problem with that is the fact that this relies on how savvy the users are. Most likely I’d need to be able to rely on individuals to report when they see a dodgy site, but there are 2 problems there:

• A large proportion of users aren’t aware of these things, so wouldn’t know to report it.
• If I’m honest, people ignore / miss a lot of the features on the site and I’m skeptical as to how many people would report these things. The users of this site from what I’ve gathered so far aren’t all that computer savvy (no offense meant to anyone!), possibly illustrated by the fact that nobody’s ever raised this issue before, and going on my previous efforts to implement interesting features and their uptake I’m not sure how much use it would get.

The site’s only small, less than 500 uniques a day, so interaction is really not huge and I’m not likely to be able to recruit any dedicated moderators.

But I can give it a go and I’ll look into setting up a black list and reporting mechanism but other than relying on people to not post them in the first place and if so let me know if they come across something questionable I really don’t know what more I can do.

If you have a suggestion as to a better way to do it by all means I’m happy to listen but I really don’t know of one, which I guess is why I was also irked by your statement in your first post saying your gripe wasn’t with the poster and was with the site as a whole (since after all, if we’re being critical, the buck surely actually stops with the person who introduces a dodgy link to the site!?).

Anyway mate, cheers for the constructive response, I appreciate the underlying feedback, even if I did take issue with the way you put it.

Cheers,

Jon

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