Exchange Links to Third Party Sites Policy

[Mikey]

All,

Due to security concerns we do not allow links to third party download sites on the exchange, on the forums of this site, or in files uploaded to the site. This includes sites to download additional assets for track files in the track description fields or uploading empty zip files. I have instructed the moderators of this site to immediately ban with out warning any users who upload a zip file with only instructions in it to download the track from a Google Drive, One Drive, Dropbox, or other similar link.

If any user runs across a track that was uploaded in this manner, they need to immediately delete the file from there computer and PM a moderator, Oscar or myself with out delay.

thank you! those download links are SUPER annoying.

[Mikey]

Bumping this for viability.

...I'm sure there are much better ways to ensure a links validity rather than cutting off third party downloads in all.

Doesn't this seem a bit drastic? What about those who have worked countless hours to help better this coaster building community through their own personal work? 3ds designs, car textures, all that amazing work would be cut off from those who it is supposed to be helping. I completely understand the need for security, but I believe there are better ways protecting this community than simply cutting off the ability to easily share work between users.

[Mikey]

We are in the process of devising some automation to check each track uploads for certain defects, however there is no commercially reasonable solution that we can adopt to check the validity or security of third party thinks and the content hosted thereof. Therefor the only reasonable solution that we can provide is to make sure that we can control the content that is being downloaded from the site. If you would like to share your content with this community, you must upload the data to this community.

On the plus side this policy will insure that content is not missing because someone forgot to pay their dropbox bill or there free account wherever was deleted.

I'm not sure if other people run into this issue, but on the upload page, if the upload takes longer than a minute, the page will time out, making it impossible to upload larger files to the exchange. The only way around this is to link to the download on Dropbox or something. By bringing in this ban, it really limits on what can be uploaded to the exchange to people who experience this error.

[Mikey]

We can look into increasing the upload limits of the site. I was not aware that this was still an ongoing issue.

Please do that!

[Mikey]

I ran some test tonight and was able to get a 128Mb and 256Mb file uploaded. However the 512Mb file failed.

Can you guys confirm you can do the same?

[TTD03]

I have yet to find a 512 file that doesn't look like spam, so if you would like to point me in the right direction.

[Mikey]

I tried the 512 from the servers console and it is still failing. However 256 worked just fine.

I think we should be good as most files are > 20Mb. If anyone needs to upload a bigger file they can PM myself or oscar and we can assist them getting it uploaded.

[TTD03]

alright fine.

What if I want someone to test something I made but I got a message saying that the 'upload attachment' button doesn't allow NL2parks or NL2packages?
Or does that policy only apply to tracks uploaded to the exchange?

[TTD03]

^ PM is weird like that.
I'll get Oscar to change it to allow it.