Site: Site Announcement regarding Downloads

[RHDNBot]

Update By: USC

Recently, the site was targeted by a number of scraping services. While not malicious, their combined efforts used up a large amount of site resources and bandwidth. Downloads have been temporarily restricted until the bandwidth usage is back to normal levels. Apologies for the inconvenience, and the staff hope to have everything back up as soon as possible.

-USC, Staff Reviewer

Relevant Link

[Jorpho]

Oh dear! Is that still a thing?

I know that was a big problem with sites in the past, but I thought bandwidth costs aren't what they used to be.

[djnforce9]

I'm surprised this happened considering how there is a captcha in place to prevent mass downloads.

[Reiska]

AI is getting pretty good at solving captchas IIRC.

[B. Gangster]

Dang that sucks, I was going to download those hacks that have different versions.

[SegaMan89]

I was just gonna get those new Sonic The Hedgehog character hacks for the Sega Master System too. 

[SegaMan89]

AI is getting pretty good at solving captchas IIRC.

I haven't had to fill those out since creating my account.  It's kind of nice.

[B. Gangster]

I was just gonna get those new Sonic The Hedgehog character hacks for the Sega Master System too. 

Fascinating, for me the new versions I'm trying to get are Blue Mushrooms, and SMB-CV, for today.

[Ok Impala!]

This is unfortunate. Is there a prognosis on how long downloads will be disabled? Are we talking about hours, days, weeks? 

If this is going to take longer, might it be an idea to only disable downloads >1MB? That way a huge portion of the downloads will still be available, while the bandwidth eating ones are disabled for the time needed.

[PZT]

The plans to delete the homebrew section got covered in the news on sites like TimeExtension so it makes sense that would attract scraping

[Nezz]

The plans to delete the homebrew section got covered in the news on sites like TimeExtension so it makes sense that would attract scraping

Which demonstrates why such plans should be communicated transparently and well in advance, with a clear timeframe for the transition.

[USC]

The plans to delete the homebrew section got covered in the news on sites like TimeExtension so it makes sense that would attract scraping

And that was a misunderstanding by one of our staff - there are no intentions to delete the homebrew section. We are not currently accepting new submissions, but all existing homebrew projects will stay on the site and can be updated by the original authors.

This is unfortunate. Is there a prognosis on how long downloads will be disabled? Are we talking about hours, days, weeks? 

If this is going to take longer, might it be an idea to only disable downloads >1MB? That way a huge portion of the downloads will still be available, while the bandwidth eating ones are disabled for the time needed.

Unfortunately I don't currently know. Hopefully soon - once I have more information from the admin, I'll share it here.

[RubyEyeShabranigdu]

Don't worry, USC! Everything's gonna be alright! 

[CrocMagnum]

I'm confident RHDN will devise a cunning plan to counter these weasel bots.  

Why someone would go out of his way to explode the bandwidth though?

RHDN is offering an invaluable community service. Many thanks for your continued kindness.

[tobiasvl]

Would it be possible to enable the online ROM patcher? That way we can still download specific patches by uploading ROMs and going through the patching process, we just wouldn't be able to download the actual patch files...

Why someone would go out of his way to explode the bandwidth though?

Probably nothing nefarious in itself - someone likely wanted to archive/mirror files for posterity, both the aforementioned homebrews but maybe also other stuff, just in case stuff gets taken down. For some people it's a bit scary that valuable gaming history like ROM hacks are all hosted in a centralized space that can go down suddenly, or take down specific files (although that was apparently a misunderstanding in this case, the danger is still there).

[xnamkcor]

I'm confident RHDN will devise a cunning plan to counter these weasel bots.  

Why someone would go out of his way to explode the bandwidth though?

RHDN is offering an invaluable community service. Many thanks for your continued kindness.

I might be misremembering, but it feels like about half a year ago or 2 years ago, this site decided to either get rid of a bunch of content or announce it would stop hosting certain content.
Nothing gets those preservation juices going like finding out what used to be the most competent site for romhacks is now deciding to have less romhacks.

[marc_max]

I'm not sure if this is related but...
Some days ago, I updated one of my hacks. Some hours later after it was approved, I was curious to see the download count and saw it increased by more than 10000! O_O That was definitively impossible. Then I refreshed and noticed the download count had increased in just a couple of seconds. I kept refreshing and the download count was constantly increasing. I figure it stopped at some point.
However... I don't think it was anyone trying to abuse. Could be it's just the search crawlers that were trying to index those urls.
I suppose it's because those urls don't look like downloadable binary files, so crawlers think are more pages.

That could be easily fixed by adding

Code Select Expand

rel="nofollow" property to the download link

Code Select Expand

<a> HTML tag, that tells the crawlers not to index that page. I'm not sure if this is related to the whole thing, but still it would be a good idea to add it. It won't have any impact on users and will definitely decrease bandwith usage.

Would it be possible to enable the online ROM patcher? That way we can still download specific patches by uploading ROMs and going through the patching process, we just wouldn't be able to download the actual patch files...

Still, that could be abused since the patcher just fetches the patch file. So it would be consuming bandwith too :-/

[SegaMan89]

Which demonstrates why such plans should be communicated transparently and well in advance, with a clear timeframe for the transition.

Only advance i got was that Dr. Mario DX update.  lol

[Noside]

Man this sucks, if the site goes down for any reason (and I say this just in case) it's good to have the discord channel so we can keep in touch.

[gamingcat02261991]

OH, COME ON!