Unhelpful

I’ll do penance for posting such a long diatribe on the main page. Or better yet, just pretend I did.

Warez, as a concept, is great. The execution really bites sometimes, though.

Several things really piss me off:

Every few weeks it seems like I’ve got to get another goddamn archival program because the warez groups seem to pick a new flavor. I don’t want some wimpy-ass GUI version where I have to open each file and it doesn’t know what to do with spanned archives. I want a command line version that knows what to do with complex archives and accepts multiple files for extraction. I have to hunt down YET ANOTHER command line archival program that I’ll probably never use again, yet I can’t delete it because if I do, all of a sudden EVERY warez group will start using it again and the page with the command line version of it will be out of commission. Public shareware/freeware archives like www.winfiles.com and www.download.com always seem to have 20 GUI compression utilities, but never the command line equivalents. This time around, the flavor of the week is Ace1.1 for “.ace” files, as if zipped rarred arjed cab files weren’t bad enough, or better yet zipped rarred arjed self-extracting executables.

USE ZIP, IF THAT AIN’T GOOD ENOUGH, USE RAR. DON’T ZIP THE RARS. IF YOU RUN A WAREZ SITE, DON’T BOTHER MAKING AN AUTOMATED ROUTINE TO ADD YOUR FTP SITE .NFO FILE TO THE ZIP. NOBODY READS THOSE FILES.

QUIT MAKING 14K OF ASCII ART IN YOUR .NFO FILES FOR 2K OF ACTUAL TEXT, NOBODY ACTUALLY GIVES A SHIT ABOUT YOUR PATHETIC ASCII ART, THE 80′S ARE OVER, MAN! THINGS “OWN” AND “ROCK” NOW, THEY’RE NO LONGER “K-RAD”. And ANSI/extended character art! What the hell is *that* about? Do you have any concept of the fact that 99.9% of the people who read the one USEFUL .nfo file (the one from the group who actually did the crack) don’t view the .nfo file in a font with the proper extended characters anyway? Clue: It’s not because they don’t know any better, it’s because they really don’t give a flying fuck about antiquated TEXT-ART bravado.

NOBODY READS YOUR FUCKING “GREETZ” OR YOUR COURIER GROUP HISTORY. Nobody with a life, anyway.

Feel free to spell “games” and “apps” with an “s” at the end, rather than a Z.

I wish crack and courier groups would leave the bullshit at the main gate. No funky-ass formatted .nfo files, no (or at least minimal) “greetz” and “member lists”, ad nauseum. Use zips or rars, don’t multiple-compress releases. No “custom installers” that play shitty MIDI music. When I see a warez group installer, the first thing I do is get anti-virus beta data files that have been updated in the last few days and scan the living hell out of them with several AV programs. This is up a few notches from my already thorough anti-virus regimen. It’s not because I think that anyone plants a virus in them on purpose, rather that I won’t make the assumption that everyone else (i.e. the writers of the installers) is scanning and updating their data files as often as I.

I don’t have much confidence that anything will change though, as this is the way it’s been since the mid 80’s when the warez scene centered around the Commodore 64…

…but I do have the feeling I’m not the only person who wishes the scene as a whole would grow up a little.