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Filefront are NOT closing down :)

(25 posts) (13 voices)

Started 2 years ago by Whiterabbit-uk
Latest reply from midori

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Whiterabbit-uk

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Games Guru

My favorite download site Filefront is closing on the 30th March.

It has one of the largest stockes of mods for hundreds of different games, many of which are really hard to find elsewhere. If you own any games that are moddable such as the Battlefield series,Crysis, Morrowinf and Oblivion, World of Warcrafy, Call of duty plus many more, and you add mods to your games, be sure to go check the site out before this valuable resourse is lost.

They posted a message saying due to the present economic crysis they can no longer remain viable.

Regards

Whiterabbit

Posted 2 years ago #
midori

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Sorry to hear that, Wrabbit... I'm unfamiliar with the site, but feel badly as it meant a lot to you. I guess you'll be in a flurry downloading what you can before D-day. Too bad when great sites are closed down because of the economy. :(

Posted 2 years ago #
triphammer

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Member

Yes... I caught the message today as well when I went to my FileFront Page. Mods galore for many games as you mentioned Rabbit. I frequent the site for Star Wars Battlefront 1 and 2 files.

I'm looking for an alternative to host my files. File Planet will do the job but I'm not too crazy over their download speed or queue. It's better if you're a subcriber but still more of a hassle than FileFront was. There's plenty of sites if you google but not many dedicated to gaming files like FileFront or File Planet is.

RIP FileFront.

Posted 2 years ago #
Whiterabbit-uk

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Games Guru

Hi Triphammer,

I've been a subscriber (founders club member) for several years now and love fileplanet as much as filefront.

The download speeds are excellent once you subscribe. They purposly rate limit the servers that are open to non subscribers. Not only do you get a great download service but access to lots of other premium sites that also charge subscriptions, (but you get them free). On top of that you get free games with your subscriptions. I've had my moneys worth over and over from fileplanet and would recommend anyone who does a lot of downloading to subscribe. Last yeaar I got Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter II (unfortunately I'd just bought it before I got it for free, lol. and this year it was Company of Heroes (which I'd also bought previously, :(,, still I'm happy to pay for the service.

The more subscribers they have the less chance it will go under. (It's part of the IGN family which includes GameSpy. You also get the GameSpy premium service if you're a fileplanet subscriber.

Thanks midori.... I'll survive, lol. but you're right about me manically downloading. since I read about it earlier that's all I've been doing. I just thought I'd stop to get some sleep. :) Many of the files are also available on fileplanet, but not all of them. I'll probably spend the next five days downloading all the hours I can spare. It may even get in the way of me writing this weekends reviews (unless they are repeats)

regards

Whiterabbit

Posted 2 years ago #
Ashraf

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Member

Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo...
Did I mention nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.

Now time for some bad language: ******* ******** *** ******.

@Whiterabbit
Thanks for the heads up. Now I can move my files away before they close and upload them somewhere else.

Ashraf

Posted 2 years ago #
SimpleMinded

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Member

Lol I don't think the bad words will help Ashraf, but I think I'll say a few of them myself. This news is a bit disturbing. FileFront is one of my top resources for game downloads and file sharing and storage. Fortunately I didn't use the file storage too much.

There seems to be a disturbing trend in free services up and closing all of a sudden. Just recently I had to deal with the closing of Xdrive's file storage service. Now FileFront. Well I guess all good things have to come to an end at some time. Nothing is for certain these days with the global economy in the toilet.

Such a pity, guess I'll have to start coughing up cash for quality game downloads now.

Posted 2 years ago #
Ashraf

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Member

Nothing but Microsoft and taxes (and a few other things I cannot mention here).

Posted 2 years ago #
Chronopie

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Member

Damn my data cap, can't get everything off there that I want...
*swearing*

p.s Ashraf, you forgot death.

Microsoft, Taxes, and Death.

And lawyers...

Posted 2 years ago #
RosnSC

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Moderator

Well, being one for free games, I just had to go check it out, but I couldn't figure out where/how to download anything.

Sue

Posted 2 years ago #
reverseOrder

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Member

I have some good news, I found this posted on the FileFront wiki:
As announced March 25, 2009, FileFront site operations will be indefinitely suspended on March 30, 2009. However a massive undertaking by a large number of the former FileFront employees and the network staff to backup all the downloads for the network sites (formerly known as the FilesNetwork) was started just before the announcement in the hopes that they can relaunch the network under a new name without the loss of any of the content.

They have a wiki showing their progress here:
http://arloria.net/ircrts/wiki/Main_Page

Hopefully they'll get most of the files downloaded before Filefront closes.

Posted 2 years ago #
midori

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Member

That's awesome news, rO! Thanks for posting it. Ah, this will make the Wrabbit and others verrry pleased. :)

Posted 2 years ago #
Txnnok

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Member

sniffle..sniffle..blownose..sigh..bye FileFront, you will be missed!sob..bawl

That was my favorite one to go to too. Now I have to find another place to download. I know there are other sites, but I don't trust a lot of them. I'll take a loss of some download speed to know I'm not getting infected.

Thankyou for the news rabbit.

Posted 2 years ago #
Whiterabbit-uk

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Games Guru

I'm not sure what's going on at the moment. I've spent five days manically downloading literally thousands of files right up to the deadline of the 30th March, and found that the site was still working. I continued downloading up till early this morning (April 1st) when everything suddenly stopped working during what was going to be my last stiint as I'd managed to get the most important mods I wanted (mainly Oblivion mods), so I assumed that was it. However, on checking later in the morning after a well earned sleep, I found the site was up and running again, but with the banner stating that it was closing down gone. It was at this point alarm bells started to ring as I was well aware of the significance of April 1st so I then went to the filefront forums and guess what.... I found several posts indicating that it was just one big April Fools joke, though it was announced on the 25th originally.

Someone has posted a thread asking if we though it was funny or not. Well, considering I've had virtually no sleep since Thursday night and looking at the monitor makes me feel sick at the moment, I'm definity not pleased about it. I've got literally thousands of files downloaded from the site sitting in neat little folders on my desktop waiting for back up. Grrrrrr. :)

Ah well we live and learn.

At least my favorite site is here to stay. :)

I wonder if the news that rO found was also part of the wind up?

regards

Stephen

Posted 2 years ago #
Buckleysmom

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Member

What a horrible thing to do to people. Get some rest WR. Hope you feel better.
BK

Posted 2 years ago #
pavid

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Member

I know you've busted your butt Stephen but I think you should finish what you started. If this was an April Fool's joke it was in very poor taste and you should move all your files to another service as a means of protest and security for yourself.

As a second thought, if it was a joke then Filefront has hurt their reputation so badly that thousands and thousands of people will be taking their business elsewhere, in which case Filefront has just caused their own death.

One can only hope that they found a way to keep going a little longer so that people can retrieve their data. Five days was an awfully short time. Perhaps that's why the banner was removed. Hopefully there will be some kind of announcement clarifying the situation.

Posted 2 years ago #
midori

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Member

Hi all... did you read rO's post up above, about the former employees trying to salvage what they had so they didn't have to close down and reopen, under a different name if need be? Just a thought: perhaps this wasn't a joke at all, and simply the result of the work of many of the employees to keep the place open. So perhaps they need an applaud instead of a boo??

Posted 2 years ago #
midori

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Member

A P.S... According to the link rO posted, they're continuing they're back-up even thought FileFront still appears to be open. It's been keeping a list of their progress. Hmmm.

Posted 2 years ago #
ⓒⓗⓘⓟ

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English Mod

It WAS NOT a joke. They had every intention on closing for good on March 31st but the creators of the site bought it back.

Here's the explination copied from their site:
http://welcome.filefront.com

FileFront has been acquired by the original founders of the site and will NOT be suspended as previously announced. This is NOT an April Fool's Joke.

After learning about Ziff Davis Media's plan to shut down FileFront at the end of March, the original founders of FileFront made the decision to buy it back from Ziff Davis Media.

We're happy to announce to the gaming community that as of today, April 1st, 2009, FileFront is a completely independent company again and is no longer part of Ziff Davis Media. All previously suspended services should be active and working again. We thank Ziff Davis Media for their cooperation and willingness to keep the site and community alive.

Due to the very unfortunate timing of this event and related announcements on March 24th and April 1st (April Fool's Day), we'd like to make it perfectly clear that:

1) The March 24th announcement about FileFront shutting down was NOT an early April Fool's joke and Ziff Davis Media had every intention of shutting down FileFront by the end of March.

2) This announcement about the original founders buying back FileFront from Ziff Davis Media is also NOT an April Fool's joke.

3) We're making this announcement on April 1st because the deal was completed today and we want to bring all services back online immediately.

4) We would NEVER shut down FileFront as an April Fool's joke.

5) We are happy to be back!

FileFront has existed in one form or another (originally as FileLeech and Voodoo Extreme's downloads) since 1997. In the last 12 years, FileFront has become the gaming community's most comprehensive and trafficked library hosting millions of files for thousands of games while requiring no registration and providing uncapped download speeds. We look forward to improving FileFront and serving the gaming community for years to come.

Welcome home. Game On!

Email us, founders@filefront.com

Anyway, it's good to have them back again :]

Posted 2 years ago #
midori

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Member

Thanks, Chip! I was hoping it was the result of hard-working personnel with the best of intentions... which is just what they announced they were trying to do. Just bad timing for those who immediately think "April Fools." Sorry you got burned-out, Wrabbit!

Posted 2 years ago #
Whiterabbit-uk

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Games Guru

Thanks Chip for clarifying the situation. I didn't delve deep enough in the forums yesterday, so only saw the April Fools threads. And also thanks to midori for other info regarding this issue.

At least I now have a comprehensive library of mods for my favorite games. It's inspired me to reinstall my Oblivion, Shivering Isles and Knights of the Nine discs, so downloading all those mods probably wasn't a bad thing afterall as Oblivion is one of my most favorite of games to date since I started playing computer games 20 years ago. Besides, I send on a lot of mods to a friend who lives out in the sticks near Bozemon, so he's going to get quite a package of discs soon (he's on dial up, has a bad line, so downloading files is usually a massive bind for him).

Regards

Whiterabbit

Posted 2 years ago #
pavid

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Member

Thanks for the clarification Chip. What you have reported makes much more sense than the April Fool's rumours. While Ziff-Davis did a good thing quickly selling the site to the founders, I am not impressed with the lack of consideration shown by them in that there seems to have been only 5 days notice to its many clients. I used to think Ziff-Davis was an upstanding company but this incident has severely coloured my perception of them.

Posted 2 years ago #
Whiterabbit-uk

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Games Guru

It definitely was short notice, though it's quite possible they may have already started negotiations with the founders. I initially found it difficult to decide what I should download as I knew it wouldn't be possible for me to download every mod for every moddable game that I own. I eventually decided to download for only a few games. I already had virtually all the files for my battlefield games (I have over 200Gb for BF2 alone, lol), but hardly any for Oblivion, so I concentrated mainly on that game. I did download other mods for games such as Unreal Tournament 2003, 2004 and UT3, all the Serious Sam games (on the orders of my son who loves them) and a few for the submarine sim Silent Hunter 4. I managed to download virtually all the mods for Oblivion apart from the weapond and armor section which was one of the largest sections with around 600 mods to download. I've just about finished downloading those now though. I can get a lot of these mods from fileplanet as I have a founders club subscription, but because it is a site that encourages the community to pay, the mods are not as prolific as filefront.

All I can say now is 'rock on' to the filefront founders. :)

Posted 2 years ago #
reverseOrder

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Thanks Chip, this is probably the best possible outcome. It was just a massive coincidence and bad timing that caused Filefront to reappear April 1st. At least I don't have to worry about downloading mods now.

Posted 2 years ago #
BuBBy

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Teh adnim

Whiterabbit - on the bright side - after all the downloading you have done - Filefront have decided to add you as one of their latest mirrors. You might notice your net speed drop once this announcement goes public.

Thanks for your assistance re: the rebuild of Filefront. ;)

Posted 2 years ago #
midori

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Lol, BuBBy... *&:-D You've got plenty o' speed to spare, right Wrabbit? What a great Samaritan!

Posted 2 years ago #

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