i don't post here, but i guess desperate times call for desperate measures?: https://twitter.com/textfiles/statu...625133363912706

i'll cut right to the chase, tl;dr, mediafire is deleting all "inactive" content from their servers in two weeks. as of now, they have not made any public statement stating that they are doing this. this undoubtedly includes lots and lots of sims related content. download everything humanly possible, spread the word, curse mediafire and backup every single piece of cc that you can. this is not a drill.

and now for the tirade:

since they haven't released a public statement, the best i can do is a jason scott tweet - he's a big old data archivist guy and probably knows more about this kind of thing than you do, so while you shouldn't blindly trust people i believe him on this one. mediafire changed their data retention policy in may - basically, any free registered user who has not accessed their account in eight months will be considered "inactive" and have all of their files deleted. it does not matter if the file is being regularly downloaded by other people, if mediafire thinks your account is dead then your file goes bye-bye. a lot of other file hosting services pull this crap too, and they seem to be doing it en masse recently, but mediafire just made this change and told absolutely no one about it. even now they're only emailing inactive accounts, and since i don't even remember if i have a mediafire account... i haven't got one, and i don't know what's in it!!

i know most people in the community have moved on to other dubious file hosting sites like simfileshare, but people hosted their cc on mediafire for a long time in the late 2000s/early 2010s, and i've already found a bunch of mediafire links while going through old garden of shadows threads and dead livejournal accounts.. i somehow doubt most of these creators have logged into their accounts in the last year.

i also know a lot of sims players, even in [current year] still aren't necessarily tech-savvy: if you don't know what some of this stuff means, just try not to delete any of that old cc you still have on your computer, people might come along and ask for that ancient emo mcr t-shirt you downloaded from a mediafire link in 2009. you're probably not going to be able to download it back. the internet sucks and things on it don't actually last forever. please don't trust one file hosting site with all of your personal stuff. also you shouldn't put everything on one hard drive, those things tend to break when you look at them the wrong way.

either way, go tell literally everyone about this, ideally wherever sims 2 players congregate in the year of our dark lord 2020, tumblr after 2018 is an even scarier place and i don't like poking it with a stick if i don't have to. oh, and merry christmas

It's not even the first time they pull stunts like this. Some years back they purged a whole heap of active accounts, wiping mine without a warning. Haven't used them since, for obvious reasons. I had the same happen with PB and Tinypic. I've kept harddrive copies of my uploaded files both before and after, because file hosts (especially free or pseudo-free ones) are temperamental at best.

(I have copies of the few files I have around GoS and Insim, plus everything I have on my site. They haven't been near Mediafryer in years, and I've made sure to log into my accounts, so they should also be Box/Dropbox safe for a while yet, and as long as Simfileshare stays up, they're good - but if not, I should still have them at least two places, so I can upload them somewhere again)

Lately, I've taken to download files I want to keep instead of just saving links to download later, because at the rate files are disappearing off the web these days, especially with both picture and file hosts going the way of the dodo, it's not easy to say how long they'll stay up or whether they'll be there the next time you go to try and download. I have plenty of harddrive space

Logging into your accounts once in a while is probably a good idea. Some sites do have "inactive user purges" to get rid of filler accounts and possibly also spam accounts.

Thanks for the heads up, I have made a post on Discord and copied and pasted it to all the ones that I am on.

Here's what MF says:

"To be exceedingly clear, if you access your Free registered account from our Web or Mobile platforms, or any service using the MediaFire API once per eight months, your account will never be considered abandoned or removed. Free unregistered accounts may be considered abandoned after fourteen (14) days of inactivity. Paid accounts, such as Personal, Professional, and Business customers, are never considered inactive while maintaining an active subscription.

Content is retained in accounts based on account activity and not individual file activity. What this means is your data does not have to be shared for your account to be considered active. Data is only removed when the account is considered completely inactive for a period of time.

If we are considering a registered account abandoned, we will send 2 emails, an initial and final notice, over 15 days urging the user to access their account. Accessing your account at that time through our Web or Mobile platforms, or through any MediaFire API enabled service will prevent removal. It is not possible to notify unregistered account users since no contact email address exists."

So looks bad for old creators' content, not so much active users.

I've not gotten an email from them. So it might apply to very old accounts, if you don't access it once in a while.

Logged into MF so my shit won't get deleted hopefully. Got some old music samples I did on there I'd like to keep. Also got some TS3 CC saved but that's less important to me tbh.

You might want download them and store them somewhere just in case.

Well great, thankfully i've got google drive to finally work for me so this should be a breeze! But seriously mediafire was already sketchy, with the fact that every download redirects you to a new page being an ad, making it a gamble if downloading any file will even download the file, and sometimes it will link me to my Roblox profile because of said ad issue, yeah simmer's mods should be immortalised on SFS if possible, or better yet google drive and dropbox (not box since box is another sketchy one), to be honest my sims 3 mods folder, music and other personal crap are now safe and sound!

I made a list over at packrat of inactive creators whose content might be in danger. My plan is to back-up all of the mediafire downloads from those on the list. It's pretty short atm (starting to get longer! :-D), so if anyone here knows of any other creator(s) whose name should be included and content re-hosted, please let me know and I'll add it!

@vegan_kaktus - the late Mochasims made an archive of her CC that is hosted on mediafire.
https://mochasims.tumblr.com/post/1...ims-2-downloads

Thank you very much @omglo for letting me know! I will add her name to the list and back-up the content asap

I'm in the process of downloading as much as i can, but for now I'm not sure where to a reupload later. As I gather is box.net is not a very reliable long-term solution either (and the 10Gb of free storage will probably fall short pretty quickly with this kind of bulky archives). I guess SFS would be the best but I don't have an account yet, would someone be willing to send me an invite?
[edit: thanks to omglo I now have one ]
Thanks a lot @vegan_kaktus for all the work you're doing to coordinate the archiving efforts!

Here's a bunch of SFS invite codes for anyone reading to use. @Monsieur_Oshima
4dFPf8so8waZDKDgeuiikpI1WpQu5yGB
oiMEvBO2dhdcKyJBUTY2A3bvVE3dOJhJ
ZjVflZV5Tot84kNoKB17UriVzfOi9Lyw
UKOyaZhGVfSVc2dZrRs895Si81OSnhob
47ZdY9jjBSI2CgczWdn9bxtcebmXJBzD
JA0YAXq0sf7WZ9nVCZM9iE5bECcFHLzY
KdHDM6qtTc8EsLkjnaOSGD9PcyxtBi6A
BSbqAb6GAEVaY7uN2SOAiI3RaA84AlLE
IwegM3QDDjCqCe5FtC9ZWrhTFB0CjlNr
TjZO5CoeQvtvR24tIrYcJ5fwghONPOf6

A bunch of us have a working Google doc of what we're able to save from GoS started by Fire flower if anyone has a chance to hop in and help!
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet...Rs1Y/edit#gid=0

http://simscave.mustbedestroyed.org...p?topic=36977.0

Keeping track of saved cc on another spreadsheet here too (mostly ts3 centered creators)!
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet...it?usp=drivesdk

http://hypnotizedsims.blogspot.com/ anyone?

Has anyone saved meetme2theriver's (aka Tarlia) clean premade neighborhoods yet? As far as I know, she hasn't been active in years and her stuff is on Mediafryer.

I just re-uploaded Moogles' and MissAdia's defaults form the EM default database. Sent you a PM with the Moogle link.
MissAdia's files are here

Let me know if you still need stuff saved, and how best to do it. I haven't known how to approach the problem on my own.

@aelflaed lots of help is still needed. I believe you need to sign up for gmail, if you don't already have an account, in order to fill out that google docs spreadsheet. Or if you have an account already, sign into your account, click on the spreadsheet, and look for a spot where there's no archivist. Click on the archivist box and type your name in - it updates automatically.

If you're working on the default database, here is the way they've asked us to do it. I'm writing as if you're hosting everything on Simsfileshare. Create a folder on Simsfileshare called, for example, Default-EM-Everyday. Create a subfolder in this folder with the name of the first outfit. Default-EM-Argyle. Check all the defaults for that outfit, download all the ones hosted on mediafire.

Upload all the defaults for that outfit, no matter which creator they're from, to the same folder. Go to the next Elderly male everyday outfit, create a subfolder folder for it inside the Default EM- Everyday folder. Repeat the steps until until you've done the whole elderly male everyday outfit category. Go back to the spreadsheet and paste to the archive. If you can't do the entire category, link to what you have, and add a note on the spreadsheet listing which ones you finished, so someone can pick up where you left off.

And Tarlia's stuff? Absolutely essential!

I've been downloading stuff for the last eight hours. SFS won't upload anything - probably a bit busy today!
I have to cede ownership of the computer now though, so I hope enough other people are also working on it, so that we don't lose too many things.

Unfortunately SimsCave admin has no intention of backing up MediaFire files.



We need help downloading all of those and archiving them somewhere:

That is actually over on the Sims Archive at The Wayback Machine/Archive.Org https://archive.org/details/cleanub...sneighbourhoods

Meetme2theriver is still around. She's on tumblr now.

@Hellken - there's section for archiving SimsCave in the google doc linked below. It looks mostly finished except for the Sims section, but go to the google doc if you want to help out.