06 aug 2002

that's the original announcement from TSR:


"TSR v2 Launches!

It was a very sad day for TSR 3 weeks ago when the announcement came from MGON that the free site of The Sims Resource had to close down. Visitors to the site are still climbing every week and have shown no sign of slowing down since we launched over 3 years ago. Although this is great news for me and the site, it’s not such good news for the bandwidth bill. Serving over 4 Million downloads weekly doesn't come cheap! Advertising is near non-existent, as free site visitors will have noticed during the last few weeks. The only ads making any money these days are for adult content and casinos, none of which are really suitable for our audience.

But after working hard on new ideas to save the Free TSR, I feel that we have reached a fair alternative to closing down the free site and going subscription only. I realise that it won’t suit everyone, and I have to accept that TSR will loose some of its long-time visitors. To those people I can only apologise that we can no longer support the free site, and thank them for visiting. There is no need to flood me with hate mail, I already appreciate that we will loose people over this move, but it was financially unavoidable.

So, what can free users expect to see at TSR now?

Well, free users will notice that they now share the bright new site design of TSR. This includes an easier navigation system and faster loading static pages. They will be able to browse the entire archive of almost 40,000 downloads, and will be able to download around 3% of them at any one time. Just look out for the colored padlocks on the downloads pages, or just view the free content only. They will also be able to view much of the additional content at the site, including members profiles, tutorials etc.

The free content in the databases will be randomly generated every 3 days, and that content will not come around again until the whole archive has been free. This means that over 2000 files will be free for download during any week. It also gives every file the same amount of published time to allow for fair download counts.

Forums will remain free as part of MGON Forums."