Under what circumstances does MediaFire ask for a Captcha? I've never been asked for one there.

Some of my very first CC downloads were from MediaFire links, and the experience was sufficiently bad that it might have put me off The Sims. It wasn't just the pop-up ads. It was the "ordinary" ads on the page too. Half of them seemed to have Download buttons on them, and it wasn't clear which was the button to download the CC I wanted. Most of the others I thought (probably correctly) were trying to trick me into downloading something I didn't want. (One of them was for something with a name like "liVid". Does anyone know what it is?) In the end I must have worked out which was the right button (it's the green one near the top of the page on the right hand side with the name and size of your file), because I got what I wanted.

I actually thought MediaFire had got better since then, but it was probably just that I had got used to it, and knew which button to use. I even started using it myself when I had one or two things to offer for download. But in the last few days, it seems to have got worse again.

I, too, often have to restart or repair downloads there.

Captcha only appears once in a while. I download from MediaFire quite often and not only for Sims and I have no problems. I seriously believe a good anti-virus is a must - but it also has to have the capacity to keep your pc safe on the net - and the settings should be easy to make. I honestly cannot remember when I last had to repair a download. So in my humble opinion, a free antivirus does not cut it and it is worth paying the annual license for a good one (and they are not that expensive).

AndrewGloria .... I remember that. Mediafire has been doing this crap for some time. Most of that involved Conduit adware if you were careless, impatient or distracted enough to click on the wrong link. (I did it once and so did one of my kids. Some of those links were really pretty well-disguised, or if the page shifted as you were loading it, and you didn't wait for it to load completely, you could find yourself clicking on the wrong link. I'm sure that wasn't accidental.) Conduit was bad, but mostly annoying. It was while getting rid of Conduit that I discovered AdwCleaner so yes, it's definitely worth using that program. Even MalwareBytes alone had trouble removing some of the Conduit-related stuff. Used together, and with a bit of a cleanup in all browser settings, the programs are pretty effective at removing Conduit. (Though I do throw in an AV scan and a quick peek at the registry and in the Control Panel for good measure. Oh, and do a search for any suspicious files and delete temp files. I feel you never can be too careful while checking to see if all adware/malware/viruses have been addressed.)

But of course, some of the more worrisome malware out there makes Conduit look like a romp in the park. And MediaFire really does sink pretty low to get its income. It doesn't even pretend to care how it gets its money. That is what concerns me. When it even managed to dodge NoScript for a while, that REALLY concerned me.


EDIT ... Oops. I thought I included this link already. This is Mediafire's new darling: https://blog.malwarebytes.org/fraud...ps-on-the-rise/ When someone in my family accidentally used Chrome, we got the Norton scam page shown in the samples. It was accompanied by this really annoying high-pitched chirp. Lovely. Terminating the page immediately did leave some registry bits behind (which AdwCleaner appeared to take care of, though I do still check from time to time to make sure they don't pop up again), but I shudder to think what could have happened if we attempted to x-out or click anywhere on that page.

I honestly believe 99.9% of you out there would never call that number in that POS scam ad, but it's worth repeating.

@gazania yep that is the same scam that's been going around way back during XP hay day.

I had to completely wipe out peoples computers to get rid of it in the past. One of the things it try's to do early one is to wipe out all the security scripters on your computers.

Very nasty virus.


ADD: Like I said you can bypass all the adds and any Captcha that might pop up by right clicking on the green download button and open in new tab and it goes straight to downloading.

If you even think you may have a problem with either spyware or virus's then I would get both SUPERAntiSpyware http://www.superantispyware.com/ and Malwarebytes https://www.malwarebytes.org/ for both have a free version.

With uBlock I don't get ANY ads on MediaFire. Thank God.

As much as I love some CC that creators host there, with those nasty malware-ridden ads, I'm almost considering boycotting MediaFire. Sure, I'd miss out on some good CC, but it's not like I need it anyway and even when using uBlock to deprive them of ad revenue I'm probably still rewarding bad behavior by using MediaFire.

Fortunately, many creators are catching on. However, some slightly older meshes and CC might still be on Mediafire. Personally, I find it hard to avoid entirely.

I might try UBlock Origin, though. I can't say I've been entirely happy with AdBlock as of late. Like one or two here, I can at least disable AdBlock and check uBlock out. But not on Mediafire right away. I'll try more benign sites first to test it.

What bugs me is that these ads particularly target younger children and other non-savvy users. After all, we may know to look in Task Manager, but would a child or your 90-year-old grandmother? (No offense meant to 90-year-olds out there. Or kids. Many are far more tech-knowledgeable than I am! I mean those who aren't very tech-savvy.) To make it worse, these ads are noisy, blinking, garish. They can cause a sense of panic. A vulnerable person, upon seeing these ads, would click on anywhere to get rid of them. And that's your first mistake. That is just what they want you to do.

I do confess that when seeing that Mediafire is the only link you can use, I do get a little nervous. Still.

Amandie, I was thinking of doing just the same thing... Most of my favorite creators have moved onto Box, Dropbox, or... mega.nz? Is that the one I'm thinking of? Or, some creators just host it on their own site. So, it's not that big of a deal if I ditch MediaFire.

The only thing that comes to mind is that I'd be missing out on some of Amaryll's older downloads. It's a shame, because I really like Amaryll's downloads... but oh well.

I think I will start avoiding MediaFire downloads, mainly because I had already started a bit in the past.

@gazania Do what I did. Install uBlock then at least temporarily disable AdBlock+ to try it out. I don't know what browser up you use, but on Firefox, all MediaFire ads/pop ups are gone out of the box (no fiddling with filters like I did with ABP was necessary) and my browser is noticeably faster than it was with ABP. Once I determined that uBlock worked better for me, I fully uninstalled ABP. Don't uninstall ABP yet, just disable it long enough to test uBlock, so if uBlock doesn't work, you can easily uninstall it and revert back to ABP.

And I'm pretty tech savvy and even I would go into a panic and try to X out of those crappy ads, just because normal popups let you and I'd be trying to get the site closed quick before it can foist its payload onto my PC. So if I didn't have an adblocker I'm sure my computer would have BFBVFSed a LONG time ago.