To our downloading friends and site visitors, if you are having problems downloading files lately from our site, and it used to work before please do read and make a note of this.

The problem is almost certainly because you are either running a personal firewall like Zone Alarm or you are using some kind of download manager or both. The odds are extraordinarily good that your utility is blanking out the referral information that your browser would normally send when you click on the download links. This will not work at elricm.com. We only allow (authorize) download links that originate from one of our subdomains of elricm.com. If your firewall hides this, the download link will fail and you will be redirected to the error page that you probably keep seeing. Try turning off your firewall to see if that is the cause, or use a different download manager.

Why are you doing this to me? It used to work before!

Well, you’re right. We used to allow blank referrers in the past but not any longer. Why? Because we’ve received an enormous amount of abuse this past month from bandwidth hacks and this was one of the holes they were using. Basically what it comes down to is this: if the requestor is unwilling to let us know where the request originates from, then we are unwilling to serve up the file.

But not me, I’m not doing that!

Well actually, yes you are. If you continue to get this page when you click on a download link on our site then I can tell you for certain that the reason is your browser did not send the referrer along with the request. After all I think I should know, I wrote the code! Now this might be because of your firewall or it might be the particular download manager that you’re using. IIRC, freedownloadmanager has this annoying habit. Zone Alarm also does this now.

What does a request look like?

These are parts of a typical request:

Request: downloads.elricm.net 221.6.3.73 - - [21/Jan/2007:04:24:28 --0600] "GET /morrowind/models_text/RTS-LandMeshPack2-CavesMntns.7z HTTP/1.1" 500 1402 "http://www.elricm.com/nuke/html/modules.php?op=modload&name=Downloads&file=index&req=viewdownloaddetails&lid=3380" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)"

The hostname for this request is downloads.elricm.net
The requestor is 221.6.3.73
The request is to GET the file RTS-LandMeshPack2-CavesMntns.7z
The user-agent is Mozilla/4.0
And the all critical referrer is: http://www.elricm.com/nuke/html/modules.php?op=modload&name=Downloads&file=index&req=viewdownloaddetails&lid=3380

Ok that looks good, yes? Well it does except that this is one of the many proxy IPs we’re blocking right now. Your request will look just like this except that the referrer field will be blank instead of something like http://www.elricm.com/nuke/html/modules.ph...ls&lid=3380 which is where the request originated from in the first place. If you don’t send it, you don’t get it.

We're sorry if you are having problems, we don't like restrictions either but such is the way of the internet lately. So remember, if the referrer information is BLANK, you will not be able to download files from our site.

Thank you for the comprehensive explanation .... it should answer many questions people have regarding mod downloads.

ciao,
Salamandar

I expected you would have to do something like this soon, and I think you are wise in doing so. Thank you for the explanation, as it lets us know we haven't lost our minds. I haven't had any problems yet, but if I encounter any, I'll know what to do.

does this include mega manager? i downloaded and installed it, but i didn't like it, so i tried un-installing it, but there seems to be no way to do it, i can't even delete the folder it is in...

I used to be able to download mods from your site using a download manager. Specifically, I used Firefox' DTA manager. My uncle who downloads most of the big files for me, I don't really know what he uses, but we both can't download any more.

I used to right click the [Download Now] button, then paste it in my DL manager's address box (or even my browser's address bar), then the download would commence. Now it doesn't.

Will you be returning the old system in the near future? Or will I be able to ask someone for direct links for downloads? I really depend on Elricm for the bigger downloads.

I appreciate your problems as a webmaster, and I certainly appreciate the facility that you provide so generously.

However, as a sysadmin and security nut, I certainly don't like advising people to turn off software firewalls, especially when I don't know whether they've got some sort of hardware firewall as well. You just run the risk of encouraging more bots to attack your site.

Tough question. Don't know the answer.

However, as far as Zone Alarm (Pro) goes (haven't checked the free version yet), you can disable "Remove private header information" under: Privacy-Main-Cookie Control-Custom-Cookies-3rd Party Cookies" and that will satisfy your requirements.

Not sure what the ramifications are, but there you go.

DTA (Download Them All) for Firefox works quite well. It should work fine for you as well as long as there's nothing else influencing the process. When you click on the download link with Firefox and choose DTA, you'll see the URL for the file and most importantly, the Referrer URL. DTA should have filled that in automatically for you. If it's blank, then something else on your system is blanking it out. As long as that URL is filled in your download will work. As a test you can clear it out and you'll see that you'll get redirected to '404forbidden' rather than the file.


I'm not advising people to turn off their firewalls. People keep telling me that my site doesn't work for them anymore. What I'm saying is if you want to find out why, and don't know how to diagnose the problem, try turning off a firewall if you have one as a test and try the link again. If it suddenly works, you now know what the problem is and where you have to make changes.

im not sure what to do, i figured out what i had to turn of in order to download something of ElricM, but apart from turning it of when im gonna download something i have no idea what to do, and i have no idea what the thing im talking about is in english either.

It seems like it is supposed to protect personal information or something like that, it is a part of norton internet security

I use Opera, and referring logging is a tickbox. I found this out when I saw the new 404 at elricm, it is now on cheers.

Happy with that. Thanks. Experimental times ahead.

With GetRight I tried each of these configurations under "Send "Referer" in HTTP requests:"
Calculated from open web browser page.
Generated from the download URL.
Random from the download URL.
Send the URL as the Referer.
None except GetRight's special "Referer values.

Not one of those worked with or without Flashgot and with my firewall disabled both ways.

Download Accelerator Plus also doesn't work.

Thanks for the explanation. I haven't had any trouble lately, just an occasional slowdown in the downoads. (I have DSL highspeed, so a slowdown is 150-160 instead of my normal 260) Figured that that was due to traffic, because your site is so popular. Good job.

I tried GetRight after I saw your post at our site and couldn't get it to work. Personally I don't think much of that utility.

Internet Download Manager (http://www.internetdownloadmanager.com/) works quite well and it works with IE, Mozilla and Firefox. I would definitly suggest trying this out for anyone who is having problems with whatever download manager they're currently using.

Well it seems I'm having no problems. Which is good since I'm rather internet-illiterate. Phew..

I have no problems downloading from the site, but then, I also sacrifice chipmunks while running around in me starkers, chanting political slogans, before clicking to download. Where technology fails, magic works.

Political slogans... So that's it! And here I was, sky-clad, sacrificing chickens, playing the tamborine, and and...

OK to the point.

"Twas a good boy, registered, referral info & all that...

...And recieved the following: (paraphrasing in all due respect to the admin.) "You've exceeded the maximum number of downloads. Now bugger off or we'll block you-- you thieving little magpie!"

The silly part is that I hadn't downloaded a thing!

Unfortunately I'm not the only person who seems to have run into this screen. I'm not that serious of a person, but it does seem to get a number of people a somewhat miffed.

What might be happeing that we get this message? (Chicken bones and tamborines aside)

thx

A *month* to this question about a very serious issue?

Incredible.

Errrrr, I wouldn't call being unable to download a plugin from one site a "serious" problem. I can't get stuff from elricm either, so I just call it "broken" and go get stuff elsewhere. It is not worth losing sleep or fussing over.

Do either of you have firewalls activated, and is your referral information blank, as mentioned in the first post?

We began instituting more restrictive d/l measures after we exceeded something like 30TB in about a week. As Elric stated, it was clearly a DoS attack and we apologize for any inconvenience. I'm running ZoneAlarm myself, and I have to turn cookies off whenever downloading from ElricM.

I don't frequent these forums very often, so if you are looking for an answer to a specific question could you please PM me instead. At least that way I'll get an email and know that someone is looking for help.

Your post says you hadn't downloaded anything, but our message popped up saying that you've exceeded the maximum number of downloads. I presume this is for an individual file? We restricted the number of times a single file can be downloaded to 5x/day. At the time that we put this policy in place we were getting hundreds and sometimes even thousands of downloads for files like Qarl's texture replacers. All from individual IP addresses. For most people restrictions like that have no effect since most people don't download the same file numerous times in one day. The unfortunate side effect is when downloads fail for one reason or another and the visitor tries again. When you hit 5 that's it for the day.

Again, if someone is having an issue, please PM me and we'll try and work it out. Just yesterday someone with an AOL address was rejected and as it turns out, the address they had (that day) was listed in an RBL (Realtime Blackhole List), presumably from someone else at AOL that had used that address in the past for spamming. All of our incoming connections are checked against multiple RBLs (and other sources) to keep the bad guys out.

Sorry for not checking back on this thread in so long. Thank you for your response and efforts.

I'm not sure why but downloads are working very well for me now, and have been for the past few weeks. I keep updating the browsers, have had to restore drives, have updated my Nortons. There is no way I can really track down the fix.

I also want to thank you quite sincerely for a great site with a wonderful range of mods.