Exactly THAT day, whenn the pay-option came up, all of a sudden the servers, who had been working flawless for years and years, became dizzy, and the people who are not willing to pay FOR FREEWARE!! experience a whole bunch of crap.
Hey folks at simviation, what are you trying to tell us? It's more than obvious, that you are forcing the people to pay that f****** membership, so you can squeeze money out of them, by offering freeware by third parties.
Personally, i don't give a s*** about those solutions you're trying to give us, like suggesting that only IE works and that the security settings may be too high...
Trying to fool me??! It is more than obvious what you're doing, so don't underestimate the people's abilty to see through a cheap try...
This page is no longer the first adress to get new files for FS-Products....

I have no ending for this, so i take a small bow.

I'm talking about  that downloading became mission impossible here, because 95% of the time it plainly doesn't work. I've been here since 2000, and i've never experienced those problems.
This thing makes it up to: pay or die. That's it.

Ah really, keep tellin me. Whenever you see that tag "sign up for faster downloads" i can guarantee you, that the link won't work. And you know why?
Marketing.
"You could have this file, but without paying us, you will have a hard time getting the download started. In fact, we slow you down intentionally, cause we want to earn MONEY for other peoples work."
That's fact, don't tell me something about my machine, dude. You know it, and if you really believe in that sh** you're telling me, probably you should check your own. And I'm not speaking about my PC!

That reminds me of putting on my brown ribbon for today.

Nothing wrong with the Downloads...

The Membership is just to help cover the Bandwith costs!

Regards,
Stratobat

I trust Pete...but as a designer I still went and tested the servers for hookup problems, slow D/L speeds (below the admitted limits) and the whole host of potential "scam" types that other sites have done.

Found everything worked just as advertised, and just the way I expected it too.

Pete is doing it right... a totally optional membership service alongside a totally functional free service, and both working correctly.

This is a complete load of nonsense. I've had no problems at all downloading from the free site since the Premier membership started. It's no different now to how it was before.

Of course, this might depend if you're used to leaving your computer on all night while it's doing multiple downloads. I know some people do that which is what takes up a lot of bandwidth & caused problems for other users in the past. This site has been running for over 6 years now. Membership is optional as advertised. You can still download as many files as you wish & access the complete site, including this forum, perfectly free of charge.

Pete has done more than most people will ever know for the FS community. You should be thanking him from the bottom of your heart instead of complaining about non-existant problems. You either have optional membership or no Simviation. It's your choice.

I have absolutly nothing to do with the running of this site. And like i said its working fine for me. I was going to give you the benifit of the doubt and perhaps say there could be a server issue or something like that with your ISP rather than your computer.
If your using a download accelerator they wont work to the best of my knowledge. I believe some people have had issues with some of the browsers.
You have done nothing to help yourself with a rude attitude. If you had just said you had a problem, given the details of your operating system internet connection speed, and browser then you might have gotten somewhere.

As the above guys said - & said without any falseness due to what you may suspect could be a vested interest.

The free site IS freely & easily available - the files will quickly download with a max speed of 30KPS.

I guarrantee you there is no attempt to pull wool over anyone's eyes or give any false information for short term benefit on my side.

I am genuinely on the side of users. I am passionate about giving our users a great time here & certainly wouldn't take anything from this. I simply HAD to draw in the rope on the free for all abusive downloading that would have driven this site out of existance & me into bankrupsy. As it is things are just begining to get to a break even point.

I regularly check things from other PC's as well as ask friends to test things. & like the guys have said above - there is NO - ZERO- problem downloading files from our free server & 30KPS is an OK speed.  If you are having problems the way to go is approach things as a problem rather than suspecting there is a 'pay or die' attitude - which I can 100% assure you there isn't.


& the bottom line is this- server user logs are completely as they were before membership started  - & if people couldn't access files easily they wouldn't be using the site as much as they were before.

Like I said - sorry you're experiencing problems but this has something to do with how your software or ISP connects with our FTP server.