Board Thread:M.U.G.E.N Discussion/@comment-26898840-20170206210742

I may be coming off as incredibly whiny judging from my title alone, but after so many months of managing and adding to my MUGEN I'm really in the mood to tear that horrendous excuse of a downloading portal a new one. And something tells me a certain amount of you here feel a similiar (if not the same) hatred for MUGEN ARCHIVE as I do. I would love to know about any earlier forum threads here ranting about the ARCHIVE as well.

How do I put my thoughts correctly? Well you see, ARCHIVE isn't really as much of an actual downloading site for MUGEN content as much as it is just one gigantic middle finger to anyone who simply couldn't find that one character/stage/screenpack/etc. anywhere else BUT the MUGEN ARCHIVE. The site's name makes it's aim fairly obvious: To act as a permanent mirror for MUGEN content that can't be found elsewhere either yet or anymore. But the way it functions makes it one of the most arbitrary and frustrating things ever.

First of all, it really REALLY hates unregistered users who dare to try to download anything from it. I'm well aware that it has gotten slightly better by allowing unregistered users to download things with a file size below 10MB, but stupidly enough, any and all content there that has a size below 10MB I was able to find EASILY in any other content hosting site like Free For All (which hated ARCHIVE's guts like I do) or this one right here (I don't know how you guys feel about ARCHIVE though...).

Don't believe me? Here's an example (albeit a poor one...): This character here, which is a bad one, yes, but I'm one hell of a connoisseur in bad MUGEN characters, so I really wanted to get my hands on this one for no reason. The only site that had this character back when I first found him was, indeed, MUGEN ARCHIVE and that was at the time where the site outright prevented all unregistered users from downloading anything. And now a few months later (I... can't really remember) when I found out that ARCHIVE now allows some downloads for unregistered users I went back to Bully in the Launderette's wiki page here, only to find out that now it's hosted on MEGA.

You see what I mean? This isn't the only example of this that I experienced of course, and it kinda appears that people hate ARCHIVE so much they're eager to get their hands on the stuff it hosts and mirror them elsewhere where people can actually download them properly. That may be just me though... or maybe not.

Meanwhile, there are characters I've been eager to get my hands on that ONLY exist there. For example, it turns out that someone actually MUGENised Touhou's Shinmyoumaru Sukuna (That tiny purple haired final boss of Double Dealing Character sitting in the bowl), who I always wanted to have a MUGEN creation of... BUT, it only exists on ARCHIVE and I can't download it at all (lessening, or kinda worsening this is that she's only available for Mugen 1.1 anyway, which I don't use at all, I use 1.0)

I wouldn't even be complaining about all this if I were to have a registered account there myself, but... second, and WORST of all, the site's registration is screwed beyond belief. I attempted to register myself there for like EIGHT times (I even made new e-mail addresses just to make sure) and all the times I filled out everything it then said something like "this e-mail address is banned from this site, if you believe this was in mistake, contact the site administrator"... yeah, no. I use AOL, and all my alternative e-mail accounts are on AOL as well, so maybe it has something to do with ARCHIVE not liking AOL that much... maybe it's even a bug, but I seriously doubt that, as I've been trying to register there for month after month... it sure should have worked after a while. And mind you, I didn't do anything wrong on ARCHIVE, mainly because I NEVER HAD AN ACCOUNT THERE TO BEGIN WITH.

So registering there doesn't seem to work for me... I should consider making a new e-mail address on another site entirely just to get there, whether it's gonna work or not... but that may not be as much of a salvage either, as I have heard that apparently ARCHIVE also hates users that don't contribute to their site much and may even outright ban them after not actually uploading anything there for a while... now that would be a whole new level of retarded.

Third, I find it highly suspicious (and disgusting) that ARCHIVE chose to add AdFly to the content they host on their site. It's seemingly not that big of a deal, but I can't think of any other content hosting site that does this... EVER. It makes it appear that ARCHIVE really loves profitting off of other people's work. See, they don't just archive stuff there, they just look around for all content they could find to host there, so it only adds to my perspective. I may come across as some kind of conspiracy theorist, but I find it highly hypocritical of them to leech off of other people's work and yet call all unregistered users "leechers" themselves for daring to just come to download something from there.

Really, I can't think of anything else to say, I just hate MUGEN ARCHIVE with a passion and I think I can be somewhat confident that it's not just me who thinks the same. I can't possibly see how I'm the only one experiencing that banned e-mail issue. That's just ARCHIVE pissing me off. Again, any MUGEN thing I try to download and I can only find it there I may as well not have been able to find at all. True, you CAN download things there with a limit, but those same things anyone can download have immediately been mirrored elsewhere on superior content hosting and downloading sites like Free For All, this Wikia, MediaFire, 4Shared or MEGA, making ARCHIVE's purpose nearly nonexistent.

Anyone who actually used it probably has a much better idea than I do, but I just despise it like hell. And this forum post was made for no other reason other than to blow off some steam.

If you however just so happen to feel the same way I do, or think I'm a whiny piece of cow dung, please comment below. I would love to hear from ya! 