Greetings Planet Minecraft

It has come to our attention that there are some shady characters who have been contacting the popular texture pack artists and modders on our site. What they have been offering is to have these fine members provide their work through an installer that will provide ads and toolbars and the like when the pack or mod is installed. This is claimed as an alternative to using monetization services such as adfly and similar services. They have also tried to bribe several of the moderators when they were contacted. This user has been banned from PMC for the safety of the community and for breaking our rules regarding commercial advertising on our site.

While it sounds like a good idea as they claim to offer much larger payments than services like adfly, the reality is that many toolbars that free software attempts to install are not useful programs and sometimes mimic viruses in the way that they behave. A major part of what these tools do is that they report your activity back to whatever company created the tool so that they can gather detailed information about what you look at and what you do online, making it easier for them to make advertisements for things that they think you would like. These companies will also sell this information to other companies that might not have the same goal in mind with that information. Additionally, when you attempt to remove these toolbars and goodies, many of them are built in such a way as to make it extremely difficult or impossible to remove.

The last point for this is that this creates a nuisance for the users of these popular items, and gets you used to performing dangerous actions while online. If one day someone decided to post a dangerous installer instead of one such as this under the guise of installing your favorite texture pack, they can do things like steal your or your parent's money from their bank, spy on you, and take over your computer. For these very scary and very real security reasons, Planet Minecraft does not allow this type of distribution for any content on this site. The very small number of executable files that have been allowed on the site are all ones that have been thoroughly examined to make sure that there is nothing fishy going on.

We are currently sending PMs to people that have been contacted regarding this service to make sure that they are aware that this is not allowed on Planet Minecraft. Additionally, anyone found using this service will have their submission disabled until the files are available normally through standard downloading or accepted services like adfly. For questions about this, please provide comments below and the moderators will try to answer them when we can.

~Zaralith