Well that's not quite what happened is it? It was never "popular". I got my stuff abused and retaliated in a benign, schoolboy fashion for laughs.

Though if shall own any blame it's for being naive and inexperienced in the days before we all needed rate limiting against corporate bots.

As it goes, the whole shebang got archived on Wayback/Internet Archive so all the goodies remain up there for people to enjoy and I stopped needing to run a box and deal with misuse. God bless the Internet Archive I guess.

The issue was hotlinking directly to resources, which has been a no-no on the web since day one. The fault is entirely on the side of the bad actors who misused a free resource and in so doing ruined it.

You know that is not in the spirit of the website. They were taken advantage of.

Old mate probably doesn't know, as a lot of people have been conditioned that if its online it's free.

Should've cached the responses!

If you offer a zap sound for a game maybe 3 devs download it if they use it on their games 30,000 people might download it. Its pretty obvious one is the intended use and one is not.