Odd rules, why?

[TI-Man]

I've heard BA is the best place to upload abandonware, or in this case Technet discs, without ever having anyone be able to download them. Therefore, i'd like to ask a few questions about why some odd rules are in place:

1. Why MDF? Disc dumps are supposed to be in MDF format, but ISO is the industry standard.
2. Why is it that if you hit the 50GB daily limit too often, you get banned? I've seen people say you can be banned for a mere 2 days of bumping the limit.
3. Why doesn't donating get you FTP access? You're paying to keep the site up, so why not reap the reward?

I'm not trying to aggravate anyone, these are genuine questions.

Thank you.

[mrpijey]

1: ISO may be industry standard, but it's also the worst format for preservation, which is what aim at. We want to save as much information about the disc as possible, and ISO is the worst format for that. ISO also doesn't handle multisession etc as it's a single track format. The DIC format which we're moving towards do use ISO however, but it also saves all the extra info along with it, and properly. But we would never accept just a bland ISO file. DIC if your hardware supports it, or it's Alcohol120% which can be easily converted to ISO by the user if they want it that way.

2: No one has been banned for hitting the limit in two days, but we have limited the daily limit for users that has forcefully leeched the site for weeks. We don't mind if you max out your quota for a few days trying to get a few releases, but if you keep sucking the FTP dry every day for weeks then that's excessive use, we're not a leech station. Refer to our Fair Use Policy.

3: We decided that a release contribution would be more rewarding to the community as it expands our archive and helps with the software preservation project, members also have to make an honest effort becoming a FTP member rather than just paying a dollar to go in and leech thousands of releases. Unfortunately the donations as they are don't cover the expenses, and the only way to cover the expenses would be a subscription model which we feel would be wrong for all parties involved.

[TI-Man]

1: ISO may be industry standard, but it's also the worst format for preservation, which is what aim at. We want to save as much information about the disc as possible, and ISO is the worst format for that. ISO also doesn't handle multisession etc as it's a single track format. The DIC format which we're moving towards do use ISO however, but it also saves all the extra info along with it, and properly. But we would never accept just a bland ISO file. DIC if your hardware supports it, or it's Alcohol120% which can be easily converted to ISO by the user if they want it that way.

2: No one has been banned for hitting the limit in two days, but we have limited the daily limit for users that has forcefully leeched the site for weeks. We don't mind if you max out your quota for a few days trying to get a few releases, but if you keep sucking the FTP dry every day for weeks then that's excessive use, we're not a leech station. Refer to our Fair Use Policy.

3: We decided that a release contribution would be more rewarding to the community as it expands our archive and helps with the software preservation project, members also have to make an honest effort becoming a FTP member rather than just paying a dollar to go in and leech thousands of releases. Unfortunately the donations as they are don't cover the expenses, and the only way to cover the expenses would be a subscription model which we feel would be wrong for all parties involved.

That's... a very good explanation, actually. Thank you.

[JimOlive]

.ISO has all the files and boot information, disc name, etc. It works, what more do you want? .MDF is a proprietary format that doesn't work with anything.

[gtgamer468]

.ISO has all the files and boot information, disc name, etc. It works, what more do you want? .MDF is a proprietary format that doesn't work with anything.

It may be proprietary, but any programs like Daemon Tools, or Alcohol 120 that mount disc images can get the job done. Like mrpijey said, it's multisession, so it supports discs with more than one layers. When it comes to preservation, which is the goal of this community, persevering as much as possible is crucial. That's why there's also regulations with FTP contributions like scans of the disc(s), boxart, and any documentation that it comes with like user manuals. And not all ISO files have everything preserved. ISO may be universal, but clearly, ordinary ISOs is not the format that should be used when trying to preserve discs. If I suppose dump a disc twice, once as an ISO and another as MDS/MDF, the MDS/MDF files take up more size than the ISO when using a tool like Alcohol 120.

[mrpijey]

.ISO has all the files and boot information, disc name, etc. It works, what more do you want? .MDF is a proprietary format that doesn't work with anything.

There is more than just the files.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_image#Limitations

And MDF is documented and supported in several applications, including the mentioned Daemon-Tools. There are no issues converting MDF to ISO if you want, but for preservation uses it's not good, not unless it's bundled with all the extra relevant info which DIC for example includes. But as a standalone file format it's not acceptable and will never be. Alcohol120% is the best modern tool to use for universal preservation as we want to avoid 29 different formats depending on the title. And if you can then use DIC, works universally for DVDs, but only select hardware if you want to dump CDs. Which is when A120 comes in.

[AlphaBeta]

.ISO has all the files and boot information, disc name, etc. It works, what more do you want? .MDF is a proprietary format that doesn't work with anything.

.ISO by definition stores the filesystem, which makes it literally useless for anything that is not a single track data CD