Skillz wrote:In fact, my original intentions of ut-files.com was just to be a back end hosting mirror for a "real" site that's complete with images, descriptions, multiple download locations, etc... (Similar to Beyond Unreal's Fireworks. Since it apparently will never get fixed)
I actually intended to do that (I built even a PHP class just to read UT packages, validating them, checking dependencies against a consistent database, extract screenshots from maps automatically from upload, even extract some kinds of data to be able to have a good search engine to locate any map or mod wanted with the help of the sphinx engine or so, etc, etc, which I released to public btw), with links to trusted mirrors such as yours, and I still somewhat want to an extent, but just like you, I don't really have the time nor the financial means to do so right now, I have to finish up other things first (although the financial would be the lesser problem, since I was planning a new high performance scaled architecture of my own for free shared hosting, so with a donations system the site would be better and faster for everyone, without any it would still run to an extent, just a little bit slower and with limited capacity).
But I wouldn't link to all files in the mirror, my database would only consist of quality maps and mods connected properly to each developer who actually made them, so all the thousands of buggy stuff, room after room and redeemers in a box maps, and others along those lines wouldn't be indexed at all. Quality over quantity is what I prefer, and that would also result in having people to make a bit more effort to do something good (since what I see most of the times is that many developers either shy out or are lazy to do better).
Among several features I planned, one worth mentioning is perhaps having in each file links to servers hosting said maps and mods so one could just enter directly a server to play with a mod rather than having to download it, install it and then decide either or not looking for servers or hosting one.
Perhaps one day, once I finish my remaining stuff.