The freeware Paint.NET project did something similar. For years their download page had deceptive Download Now links which were actually spam/advertising/malware.
It looks like they no longer do this, for what that's worth, but I still don't recommend it to people. A pity as the application itself is very good.
The Minecraft modding community is full of this shit. And it’s ten year olds that don’t know any better who have to learn the hard way about this stuff.
I regularly wonder how much it would really cost to host those assets somewhere else that didn’t do that. Or GitHub! Why don’t the devs just move their mods to GitHub!?!?
Mechanism for a while could only be downloaded from a website which made it nigh impossible to do the download. I had to disable UBO, and then all the redirects and click hijacking made it almost impossible still.
It really seemed like the mod author, Aidan C. Brady, had sold out.
I didn’t have the displeasure of needing it for a few years but when I checked recently, it was thankfully available on Curseforge, which although could be better, could also be a lot worse, at least it’s functional with UBO.
Not using GitHub is pretty common with game mods in general, not just Minecraft.
I put it down to that the majority of mods are not developed by professional developers and learning git on top of learning enough coding to make a mod is just too much to ask of these people.
Really, they don't need or want version control, CI pipelines, CLI tools, or any of the things normally used by professionals. All they need/want is a good user friendly webpage to share their mods, and maybe a forum or some way for users to ask questions/provide suggestions/report bugs in a non formalized way.
Are you sure they're bundling malware just to pay for hosting? It could be the other way round: they realise GitHub might ban them for pulling that kind of thing, so they host elsewhere.
Are the mods generally FOSS? That would enable cleaned-up forks, although in the case of Filezilla this doesn't seem to have happened, which I find somewhat surprising.
No, they’re bundling malware because the sites that host mods are a cesspool, reminiscent of the 90’s warez scene - the downloads are all “type the third word from this page, the second word from this page, then click this sponsored link, then wait in a ‘queue’ where we show you video ads - and then you can download your mod at 20kbps”
I’m surprised they don’t split them up into 1.44mb rar archives “for your convenience”.
In my experience very few, if any, mod communities take a considered approach toward licensing. Whether you're allowed to base a mod on an existing mod is left to guesswork. They're quite unlike the FOSS world in that regard. moddb doesn't even have a section for licence information, unlike, say, GitHub.
Modding communities often also take a 'permissive' approach to the copyrights of the base game, but fortunately the publishers are often wise enough not to bother taking action against such mods. A mod like [0] gets to exist despite that, ultimately, it's infringing on the base game's copyrights.
Ad.fly! I just also responded to the parent about trouble downloading a mod, and you’ve reminded me it was this site.
I’ve dealt with shitty as infested download websites, but this one took it a whole new level. I had to disable UBO, and even then getting the download was nigh impossible.
I agree it’s not worth the trouble, just avoid, the website is a whole new level of user hostile.
In regards to Curseforge, I agree it’s not great, but at least it works.
I don’t like 3rd party launchers or mod management applications, so for our little server I just make .zip available with a readme with pictures.
What’s useful about Curseforge is that with just a mod identifier, you can construct links using an excel formula with the url setting download filters to be for our client version automatically. So I use an excel sheet to help me keep track of the mods and make it easy to check for updates.
It looks like they no longer do this, for what that's worth, but I still don't recommend it to people. A pity as the application itself is very good.