So I've been pretty vocal about my disdain for CC/mod creators who put their content behind AdFly links in the past, but I just went to go download Sims 4 CC for the first time in months, and now it's taking me to a website called Linkvertise that somehow manages to be even worse than AdFly.

Whereas AdFly would make you sit through some sketchy ads, Linkvertise literally does not let you through unless you click an ad and download something from the website. AKA, install literal malware or you get nothing.

I'm not sure how many people here download from creators outside of MTS, but if you do, just consider this a warning. I'm currently looking for extensions that allow you to bypass this, but if I can't find one that the website won't immediately recognize and flag me for, I suppose it's bye-bye to those creators.

This definitely aggravates me because I just reinstalled TS4 and I'm trying to reinstall some of my old content (I backed up my previous folder on OneDrive but it's nearly 10GB and taking forever to download so I might just be better off redownloading things manually and more or less starting anew so that my game doesn't get bogged down from the sheer amount of CC I was using), and now a decent chunk of it is locked behind these trojan viruses in disguise.

I hope these creators are satisfied with the fraction of a dollar they're getting per click while allowing people to risk destroying their computer over it! /s

I use Fastforward combined with ublock, it can't skip all of it (you still have to click on the button saying "free download" on the site for it to forward to the actual download) but it skips the waiting and shady ads at least.