I think we're all pretty tied to our own ideas about what will work and what won't..... and we're getting a bit ratty because we can't see why others can't see why our own ideas work.... all that is perfectly natural. There are pros and cons to every idea that anyone is going to offer up, it's up to the admins to decide wich idea has the least cons to it and implement it.
That being said, I read through this thread and the one in Open discussion and had a good think overnight about everything everyone's been saying.
I'm still tied to the pay per download way and registering at the site before being allowed to d'load too.... what's the problem with that?
Let's not forget that you have to be a member of just about every site out there before you can avail yourself of their freebies. Rendo, RDNA, DAZ,3DCommune... all the biggies and we all joined them without a murmer (I'm assuming.)
Another idea I saw mentioned was typing a number in before you can download an item (I don't know the technical term), that too seems like a good idea and will also help to weed out the naff content (as would say, a 10 second delay before you can type the number in as is done in a few other places)If somebody can't be bothered to move thier fingers over a keyboard 4 or 5 times to get a certain item, then they can't want it too badly...
Another thing that I have to admit has always puzzled me is the lack of moderators here. We badly need them. Idealy each section should have a moderator who is familiar with the genre theyre moderating... I'm not saying that the mods should necessarily decide on the quality of items, but they've always been needed here to weed out the spammers or to tell people to bundle textures etc.
Whatever is going to happen here I suggest that for their own sakes at the very least the admins should move quickly on this issue.
As the word starts to get around that there's no money to be had here the site IMO will start to find it's revenue from views slipping drasticly.
Whether we like it or not, a lot of the incentive for people to come up with new stuff has now gone, and if people start removing the items that are already hosted here, then the rot really will set in.
I'm still going to stick around for a while.... the idea of this site was a good one and I'm hoping that this mess can be sorted out quickly and relatively painlessly..