As the more active members on my discord server might already know, some time ago I started keeping track of websites that repost my work in a publicly visible list.
Until then I wasn't really aware of how much of a problem this poses to the entire Minecraft modding community and especially the resource- and shaderpack community.
Even worse is that enforcing their own rights isn't widespread among shaderpack developers, effectively tolerating all those malicious sites for the past years.
The big problem with websites that repost other peoples work is that they often shove an immense amount of ads and monetization to their pages and download links while the original creators won't see anything of the money gained that way. Furthermore the users won't get noticed about ways to suppport the original creators because these pages rarely give any credit or links to the "official" pages and downloads.
Due to that fact it is becoming more and more popular among creators to just lock their projects behind so called paywalls in the shape of patreon etc. which is an unfortunate but understandable step to do, given the situation. However personally I wouldn't feel comfortable with just locking my stuff away like this (with the one or two patreons I have anyways I could just make it private instead and it would be the same xD). Additionally the rewards program Curseforge offers us creators a nice way to "profit" without it being annyoing for the user, but for this to work people would have to use the original download links given by the creators, which is why many repost sites are causing these problems for us.
There are indeed a few sites that just link to the creators provided download links or websites, but these are very rare to find and the vast majority just does what I described above. If most sites would be like that I wouldn't have to worry as much about this kind of thing and we creators would be in a much better situation than we are now, were many of us just stopped caring at some point.
Now this is the part where you folks, the users, come into play. You can help us by spreading the word that these pages are as bad as they are and where people should download stuff instead to make our life easier.
To wrap this up I'll now also post my black- and whitelist of websites here. This list is identical to the one on my discord server but I feel like it's good to have it visible here too. Some pages also have additional notes detailing the situation if there is anything "special" to them. You can also imagine the blacklist as some sort of a (deserved if you ask me, doesn't hurt to play by the rules) public pillory here.
I cannot guarantee that the whitelisted pages are fine for all mods/packs posted on them so this list is only verified for my own projects!
As a closing note I also want to suggest you to take a look at the "Stop-Mod-Reposts" website: Link
There you can find a convenient list of websites that are practicing said harmful things to our community.
The big problem with websites that repost other peoples work is that they often shove an immense amount of ads and monetization to their pages and download links while the original creators won't see anything of the money gained that way. Furthermore the users won't get noticed about ways to suppport the original creators because these pages rarely give any credit or links to the "official" pages and downloads.
Due to that fact it is becoming more and more popular among creators to just lock their projects behind so called paywalls in the shape of patreon etc. which is an unfortunate but understandable step to do, given the situation. However personally I wouldn't feel comfortable with just locking my stuff away like this (with the one or two patreons I have anyways I could just make it private instead and it would be the same xD). Additionally the rewards program Curseforge offers us creators a nice way to "profit" without it being annyoing for the user, but for this to work people would have to use the original download links given by the creators, which is why many repost sites are causing these problems for us.
There are indeed a few sites that just link to the creators provided download links or websites, but these are very rare to find and the vast majority just does what I described above. If most sites would be like that I wouldn't have to worry as much about this kind of thing and we creators would be in a much better situation than we are now, were many of us just stopped caring at some point.
Now this is the part where you folks, the users, come into play. You can help us by spreading the word that these pages are as bad as they are and where people should download stuff instead to make our life easier.
To wrap this up I'll now also post my black- and whitelist of websites here. This list is identical to the one on my discord server but I feel like it's good to have it visible here too. Some pages also have additional notes detailing the situation if there is anything "special" to them. You can also imagine the blacklist as some sort of a (deserved if you ask me, doesn't hurt to play by the rules) public pillory here.
I cannot guarantee that the whitelisted pages are fine for all mods/packs posted on them so this list is only verified for my own projects!
| Blacklist | Whitelist |
|---|---|
|
|
As a closing note I also want to suggest you to take a look at the "Stop-Mod-Reposts" website: Link
There you can find a convenient list of websites that are practicing said harmful things to our community.