Indeed. IMO it is still better to provide something that is hard to maintain than nothing. And if games are downloaded enough they probably won't need much maintaining, especially if they appear on the main page and attract more players. We can also provide both CD images and disk versions of the games that have both kinds of archives.

However, this is for discussion indeed.

Then again there are torrents (if you want to save the bandwidth)....

Sure, adding torrents for big downloads might be a good idea?
Anybody else for it? Or against it?
I think it would be painless to adopt, I can't see many reasons against it, but then, maybe someone has a different opinion!?

Edit: I guess someone might come with the "Users are dumb!" argument again...
Well, the only other option would be to not offer the games with big file sizes then, and that's surely worse. Anyway, the only thing you need to learn with torrent clients is how to open ports. But that might be necessary either! And I think if you want these games, then you will learn it! ;)
And many people use torrent clients already anyway...

I wonder if Studentis would like the lost of advertising income .....

Okay, so the question is how much it would hurt Abandonia...
I dunno, it should be a non-issue.
You could redirect the users first to a different page with the advertising before they can actually start the download of the torrent file, just like it already happens with the game downloads!

We'd LOVE to add a torrent tracker to AB.
The problem is in the small fact that the only people with access to do that are Studentis' own staff.
As in: overworked, undermanned and not yet done fixing the existing bugs on the site?

May I ask why this access is so limited? Because it sounds like it wouldn't be such a big problem if other people could help, too...

Edit: Ah, I see. A company owns Abandonia, which isn't a reason itself, but somehow, it often is for limited cooperation. Which kinda sucks.

More to the point: We are volunteers they "inherited" (so to say) from the previous owner.

:omg: We would??? How come? I mean, I don't really understand. I thought that it is in Abandonia's interest to have people visiting our site. And providing games via some public share places means that people will have to come to abandonia and at least visit ISO cellar. And then adding reviews to the main site and redirecting to ISO cellar would be much same like we do now, except they will have some bother to download games... But I guess we could give them torrent file as well, it's practically similar. People will use what they prefer anyway...

It is our interest to have people visiting, indeed. XD
Various means can be employed to prevent users reposting the torrents elsewhere, and there are several distinct advantages to using BitTorrent for distribution of the larger files.