Recently, I received an email query from the website with no valid return address.  I thought that the poster had a good concern that others may want explained again as well, which is "Why we require registration".

Here was the original email:

The site looks nice, but I disagree strongly about the need to register just to be able to browse through the website. First I thought this site offered nothing but news, because of the lack of contentent - but I was englightened by people that I would need to register to actually find anything. In my mind, this does not go well with the idea that you would want to spread AIF to world. In fact, this only encourages for the scene to become smaller and smaller since less people find readily accessible information, or games. So, in that vein, I've decided to forego the registering and I'll go look for more information and games somewhere else. I just thought I should give you a heads up, that there are people who just can't bother with registering to every damn website that catches our interest.

And here is my response:

I appreciate your comments.  However, I am hosting this on my own server and my own bandwidth (literally, not a virtual server somewhere but my own where I run my business as well).  This is done without compensation of any sort (notice no ads on the site) and I am acually quite happy to do so.  I started providing service when the site was the old aif.emsai.net website and I provided space and bandwidth for it for several years before Orgun, the guy who started that site, decided he could not maintain it anymore. 

We had been having issues with bandwidth usage on his site and I  traced this back to a few commercial websites that, instead of linking just to our site or hosting the files on their own server, were actually linking directly to the games themselves, using our bandwidth and the games for their commercial interests.  This was violating the terms of usage of the games as well as our website.  The only way around this was to ask for registration before getting access to the files section.  I had a notice posted on the top of the main page for the first few months and perhaps I need to review putting that there again.

We would love to make the site completely open, but some of the commercial interests have made that infeasible.  The only thing your user account is being used on our site to monitor is the number of downloads.  Once one account downloads a game more than 5 times, I email that account holder and query as to why.  Without a good explaination I block that account.  Sure the commercial guys  can create a new one, but then they have to change the links on their pages every time.  It is a cat and mouse game that I do not like to play but is necessary in view of past experiences.

Sexton