At long last, the 2007 AIF Mini-comp has been released.  You may download the games from The AIF Newsletter site (http://newsletter.aifcommunity.org ), from Yahoo! AIF Archive and from the files section of this site.

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

Today AIFGames.com had a few updates installed.  These included a security update, and a new FAQ section at the request of forum users.  We also installed search engine friendly URL's on the system.  Please let me know if you encounter any problems as a result of these updates.

Sexton - Administrator

For those you you experiencing issues with corrupt files, here is a possible work around from privateNimrod in the forums.

 Click Here for Forum

"I just ran into this problem using IE and came across this thread. Since no one has posted a solution I thought I'd poke around.

Apparently, IE and PHP are disagreeing about compression. I tried ghost.zip and saw a request that included

Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate

the response included

Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="ghost.zip"; .... ; size=16844
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Encoding: gzip
Content-Length: 168824

What I received was a file named ghost.zip that was 168824 bytes long instead of the 16844 bytes. I renamed it to ghost.zip.gz and then unziped it. The resulting ghost.zip unzips just fine. Apparently, IE is not understanding the part of the headers that indicate that the file was sent as gzipped.

Can't say if that's everyone else's problem, but that seems to solve things for me."