CABAL said:
A2F is so glitchy for me that I haven't even been there in months now. Combined with the new nation blocking policy, it may be time to just let it die.
A2 Files
is effectively dead. The problems are basically unsolvable, so I would not expect that to change. Given the circumstances, I would recommend that people upload files elseware (eg, here or AFC) and just leave the site as an archive for the old files.
Having been staff on A2files for 7 of the 11 years that the site has been running for, as you might expect I am hardly ecstatic about recommending that. However I think that the community can measure it's success against the fact that second hand copies of A2 are frequently sold for more than double the price the game launched for in 2001, something which I am sure we can agree is hardly usual for games of this age!
If it wasn't for the lackluster management and blocking of certain countries, I'd be more than happy to contribute. But I see no real incentive in doing so, I can't even see certain pages and file screenshots, let alone download anything.
Honestly, the networks problems are not the existing management. Given that I deal directly with them, I would in fact take the opposite view, that Jeff, Mark and the team at Break have been great. The problem is really that they took over a dying network in the first place, Ziff Davis hadn't done anything with the network and basically just let it coast since around 2006. Break took over in 2010, at which point all of the games on the network were virtually dead, being a good decade old in most cases. To their credit, Break did put in the time and effort but honestly the problem is really the software that the Filefront Network runs on. It was custom written back in the late '90s for a single site, and it was then endlessly extended over the years in an adhoc manner with no thought for future maintenance of the code or the websites running on it. It was not written by professional standards, to put it mildly!
From an inside view, I know of three separate concerted attempts to basically scrap it and rewrite the existing code. The first was an inhouse effort by the volunteers, the second was by Ziff Davis and the third was by Break. Break achieved by far the most of any of the attempts. Ultimately however, when you fix one problem it creates another two. Even ripping out entire sections of code didn't help; the entire file operations code has been pulled out and replaced by Break- orders of magnitude more time, effort and money than spent by everybody else put together and even that wasn't enough to stabilise the dammed thing.
My belief is that any amount of effort spent rewriting the existing code was wasted since the fundamental architecture of the system was so flawed as to be absurd. I personally recommended that Break drop any further efforts to do anything with the existing code base, and the other volunteer Network admins agreed with me on that. There is a plan which I can't talk about due to the NDA I have signed, however honestly it's really too late for the network. In my judgement, blame for this lies squarely with Ziff Davis Media for the extended holiday of any form of support or development for the network, and not with Break who took the place over far too late to do anything about it.
Yeah shot themselves in the foot with that one. Gamefront/Filefront whatever they want to call themselves if a dying breed with many smaller sites now having unlimited bandwidth and storage means that they are taking up the role of hosting for particular games.
It's certainly a lot easier to launch a file hosting site, these days than it would have been ten years ago, however to be honest the only reason the network is dead is that it's impossible to actually launch any new games for it because the CMS running the show is a pile of scrap. Without that, the network would easily decimate the competition. Given the editorial teams ability to get exclusive information about a game through contacts with game publishers, it would be easily possible to make a network site the goto place for news and files
before a game was even launched, which would translate into significant traffic on launch day. If you have the first files and a community around your site, you'll be at least a major player in that games modding community to start with.
Anyway, I would second (or forth...) the idea of MSFC adopting a POTD. However, I know that it is far from trivial to implement as A2Files had.
