I have created a SMF forum at www.oldgamemags.com/forum and purchased the Download Manager Pro add-on for it.

I have setup permissions in the Download portal so anyone can view the files there but only members can download them and it appears to be working just fine.

Registrations are disabled at present while I get a few files migrated ... God, I hope it works and is the LAST time have to do this ... but this should give site visitors a view into what we have available here which can only be a good thing. Have a look and feel free to leave comments here. Niceties such as scanned by/donated by info can be added later so ignore the lack of info on the files at the present time

Seeing available downloads is of course the biggest draw for a new visitor, but I also like how it says "You are not allowed to download files" when a guest tries to download something. That's a lot more clear than this iteration of the site has ever been, and would prompt an interested party to investigate further to see how they could become able to download.

When a guest accesses the current site and all downloads are set to members only (like they are now), the download page says "No Downloads has been added yet" (Apparently English isn't the first language of whoever designed the software) and under "Latest Downloads" it says "No Downloads Available." This would undoubtedly turn away people who didn't explore the site more thoroughly. And when some downloads are made public, those people are likely to think that the public downloads are ALL that's available, period. If those two messages could have been altered to read something else (such as "you are not allowed to download files" ) it would have been less of an issue, but it's my understanding that such alterations weren't possible.

The final 2 Japan Beer Times (that I own) are now available here:
http://www.oldgamemags.net/infusions/...?cat_id=66

Right, coincidentally a week or so ago just before this issue was brought up I wanted to make a donation but couldn't find anywhere on the site to make one. I did send an email asking to make one, but haven't had a reply, maybe it was an old email address or my message went to spam, but I think a lot of users would be happy to make donations if there was an option for it.

Sorry, I was in the middle of some family issues so got sidetracked.

Given I am looking at migrating the site to SMF I forgot to update this site with the donation details. The PAYPAL address is oldgamemags@gmail.com but as I stated previously, I only ever asked for a one off 'membership' fee and always felt a little awkward about seeking additional funds from existing members. Stupid I know but that's just me.....

I like this idea, donation sent just now, marked as donation in paypal comment as already a member who appreciates the site.
Thank you for this site!!

Thanks for the support. Funds will be used to help cover the costs of acquiring another Mediafire account so we continue hosting all of our files here. Boy, I wish they would just provide a reasonable cost alternative to having to purchase separate 1TB accounts as managing multiple accounts is darned unwieldy.

The only other offering is a business plan with exorbitant monthly costs for the storage capacity we need.

Three days in and 1100+ mags have already been loaded into the new sites download area. Moving quickly to get this completed so we can move forward with better site visibility for all visitors.

At this rate I anticipate creating members logins in a couple of weeks' time. Make sure your email addresses on the current site are correct so that when the time comes you receive the auto-generated email with your login details.

Thanks Kiwi for your efforts, and to all the scanning members. I don't post much anymore but I check the new releases every week and it's very much appreciated!

If you're ever in need of funds to support the site Kiwi I'm sure most of us existing members would be happy to help out too.

Just saw the oldgamemags@gmail.com Paypal link further up. Happy to contribute, got zero doubt it will be put to good use.

Thanks for your support everyone (especially anyone donating to the cause)

Is anyone here familiar with seedboxes? As I am thinking if I can http link to download files on one it may be a more practical alternative to trying to pay for/maintain multiple Mediafire accounts. I think that's how Retromags are hosting their direct downloads so it should be able to be done.

If that is the case seedbox.eu have a seedbox for 153 Euro's per year with 5TB of storage and 10TB of monthly traffic bandwidth which seems pretty reasonable. It's not a dedicated server but it has 10gbps backhaul so for our sort of traffic I think it should suffice. For another 30 Euros that climbs to 6TB of storage and 14TB monthly traffic.

Any thoughts? It seems prudent to consider the options but I am happy to listen if anyone has other ideas that's for sure.

I have access to a friends Seedbox (via FTP) but know very little about them or even how he set it up. Go with what ever is the easiest, cheapest and reasonable download speeds that suits the needs of the site. Mediafire d/l speeds are pathetic.

Okay, I have purchased a 6TB seedbox. This gives us plenty of expansion room. I am synching my NAS up to the server as I type this and it should be completed in three or four days. I have instructions on how to enable HTTP downloads so once I have it working I will change all the links on the new forum to point directly at the seedbox then we should be cooking. Exciting stuff!!

I am hoping this is functioning properly rather quickly as one of the Medifire accounts is due to roll over at the end of next month so if I don't have to do that it will save money that could be better spent on seedbox hosting etc.

Thanks for the update. I still need to get back to scanning what I was doing. Hopefully this new website will provide the space you need.

Over 1.1TB of magazines have now been uploaded to seedbox and 3100 of these have already been added to the new forums download area. Still on track for hopefully having the migration completed in a couple of weeks and then everyone's accounts will be migrated there and we can ditch Mediafire for good.

Great to know, thanks!

Hey, Sorry been away for a while. Are you planning to directly linking to each file as an http link? or will you be creating torrents/magnets for each link? The benefit of using the torrent approach would be sharing the bandwidth with other seeders/leechers. Not to mention that the mre seeders the faster the downloads are. Also if the site ever went down then people can still download the files as long as they have the magnet links.

I have a seedbed with about 1tb so I could help with seeding some content.

What would be really cool would be a torrent tracker, it would give people incentive to help with the bandwidth by seeding in order to download more (or even better by contributing their own scans). Also donating to get GBs of ratio is also a thing on trackers which could help with scanning costs. Just an Idea

At this stage it would be HTTP links as torrents are rarely seeded unless incentives are made for ratio's and suchlike and we have nothing here that would provide such an incentive and also because I just know someone will invariably give out our torrent link and then it will end up a free for all which I have already experienced when the site was open way back in the WordPress days where I had hundreds of thousands of downloads on our files and no incentive to donate or sign up.

Additionally, with Archive.org getting DMCA's on mags from Future etc I prefer to keep a low profile, which has definitely happened since it became a membership oriented site.

Two weeks on, all of our files have now been uploaded to the seedbox and I am in the process of adding the mags and updating links on the new forum. Hopefully not too long now ....

Great! Looking forward to use the new forum! Maybe we could try again to cheer it up with more topics, more conversation... I don't know, "guess the game", "what game are you wasting your time on", "tell us about your Romanian films preservation project", etc.