In terms of deleting - Only thing I found under "Visibility" is then a section called Deletion where you can submit a request to get it deleted. 

Edited February 18, 20233 yr by Zangoose

I feel people who delete their content off the site will also end up being blocked from the site....

11 minutes ago, Kaiii3 said:

youn are at one^^ Sadly the library here at AVSIM is stuck (UX) in 2000 😞

Hehe I know! But if they decided to, they'd be in a good position to go for it.  Web-app & database dev skills are more common nowadays compared to 2000, and the existing site and good name would make a good starting line.

9 minutes ago, carlanthony24 said:

I feel people who delete their content off the site will also end up being blocked from the site....

Which would accelerate any death spiral as new uploaders won't find that behaviour attractive.

1 hour ago, B777ER said:

Avsim would be in the same predicament flightsim.to now finds itself. Hosting all that and the web traffic it would bring costs a ton of money.

Hmm, MSFS may be more popular I suppose than FSX or P3D was, but I remember not very long ago flightsim.to never existed and AVSIM (as well as another similar website) is where I downloaded most of the generous freeware content produced since at least like 1998 or so when the freeware became more popular. What am I missing? Did AVSIM bandwidth get cut or something?

There is another point not yet mentioned.

As far as I recall, flightsim.to didn't have those nasty 10-s-waits initially. Next came the added payware to get a return. Now we get that "premium" offer. What is to come yet?

It would have been much more honest, to openly present a concept of funding from the outset. I am sure they would have a rough guesstimate on the resources required from the outset, wouldn't they? But as things look like, they tried to grow quickly into a quasi-monopoly, at which point they found it appropriate to introduce those less popular funding measures.

And btw, as already mentioned, who are those guys? I meet many freeware uploaders here or on other fora, but never read from one of the flightsim.to operators in our community outside their own ecosystem. 

Usually, such behavior doesn't pay out well. The older ones of us may well recall PapaTango or Ariane Designs.

Kind regards, Michael

Edited February 18, 20233 yr by pmb

A Youtube streamer who calls everything early access but gets corrected on it all the time because he doesn't seem to realize what it actually is. Same streamer calls out FSS about the E175 his words (to make the community aware of the sort of behaviour going on) doesn't call anyone else out though.... wonders if he will call .to out on what they are doing... 

59 minutes ago, KERNEL32 said:

Did AVSIM bandwidth get cut or something?

Flightsim.to has averaged nearly 20 million downloads a year. And many of those will be in the hundreds of megabytes. 

The average file here is in the single figure megabytes, more likely less than a megabyte, and the other sims have been around for so long there'll be very few ongoing updates to drive downloads. 

I'd guess the current demands on the library here are a small fraction of one per cent in comparison. 

Edited February 18, 20233 yr by superspud

26 minutes ago, pmb said:

And btw, as already mentioned, who are those guys? I meet many freeware uploaders here or on other fora, but never read from one of the flightsim.to operators in our community outside their own ecosystem. 

 

Thats the thing, out of all the devs  i know and talk to (wich is quite a lot, being one of them) no one seems to know who these guys are. They sure are "among us" somewhere, because they definetely know the sim space very well. its a bit too good to be true for them to be outsiders that came with MSFS. Possibly an MS or Asobo guy for all i know, that would not surprise me, they really got on top of things from the get go, without missing a beat (until today of course 😄 ). Not sure its what i actually believe, but it makes a good story nonetheless 

2 hours ago, leprechaunlive said:

And a little birdy told me many top freeware devs are pulling their stuff as we speak...😱🤐

And where is it that they will go? There is no where else to my knowledge. The AvsIm library for sure isnt it!

9 minutes ago, B777ER said:

And where is it that they will go? There is no where else to my knowledge. The AvsIm library for sure isnt it!

Thats gonna be the next step. Their own private site for some, and alternative site that werent sexy anymore that might get a second life because of this. who knows! OR, back to .to IF they get a revision of ToS (and if they have a bit of trust left)

10 minutes ago, B777ER said:

And where is it that they will go? There is no where else to my knowledge. The AvsIm library for sure isnt it!

Every failure bears a chance.

Not immedieately, and probably not based on one of the legacy repositories, but I can imagine some clever people to take chance, should flightsim.to demise, which no one can foresee yet.

Kind regards, Michael

I empathize with the creators who disagree with flightsim.to's TOS. But everyone complaining about the optional premium plan will be sorely disappointed if flightsim.to shuts down or becomes obsolete, as any successor will only be able to survive if they are also somehow able to monetize a site in order to pay for hosting and development costs. I also disagree that all creators should get a free premium plan, as anyone could abuse this by putting minimal effort into developing a useless addon in order to get premium for free.

If we do lose flightsim.to and there is no successor, the majority of casual simmers will do what I would do and just not bother with freeware anymore, as it will become too time-consuming keeping track of dozens/hundreds of GitHubs, Discords, Dropboxes, etc. Not to mention that Github, Discord, Dropbox, etc. all have their own TOS and there is nothing stopping any of them from modifying their free options, forcing creators to pay after hitting a certain file size or download limit.

We're seeing something similar pan out in the world of Twitter. Disgruntled users set up their own servers on Mastodon... and quickly realized how expensive it is to be your own content provider.

Just now, leprechaunlive said:

back to .to IF they get a revision of ToS (and if they have a bit of trust left)

That's the big will-they, won't-they, isn't it. 

Relinquishing the ability to delete clearly goes against their plans big time, for reasons that don't feel compelling from the outside, but so does a large number of creators clearing off. 

The statement they want you to agree to when you arrive at the site doesn't give any indication of a change of heart, just a brief concession. 

I decided not to upload anything new when deletions were denied 2-3 months ago and then it slipped to the back of my mind somewhat. I am half minded to grab the opportunity to exit completely and think again. 

Well their site is down for now anyway, hopefully not for 7 days 😄