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As you may have noticed, Retromags has turned on download restrictions for a few key member groups. Over the last 6 months I have let all registered members download as many magazines as they wished from our download manager. In that time all I see is rampant abuse of the system. Everything from using throw away emails for registering, to running scripts that automatically hammer the system by trying to click on every download at once. I can easily tell when files are being downloaded by a human...versus when a script is doing the work. All this does is cause grief for myself and the rest of our community. 8 out of the top 10 downloaders of our releases are members with ZERO posts, ZERO comments, ZERO contributions to anything here at Retromags. Yet each of these members have downloaded 800+ files. I see no reason to allow them to continue to cause trouble and slow down the speeds of your downloads. In a perfect world, servers and bandwidth would be free. I would be able to let every visitor to Retromags download as much as they wanted. However this is not how the world works. The two most commonly abused member groups here at Retromags are Newcomers and Members. The group Newcomers is where everyone starts, so of course it has the most abuse. Since I can't account for every throw away email address website out there, this is the one that will really feel the squeeze. Newcomers* - This group may download as MANY files as they want from FileFactory, Newsgroups and any other externally hosted file service. But as for DIRECTLY downloading magazines from our download manager, this group will be restricted to 1 file per day. Users in this group will be promoted to Members when they reach 25 posts on the forums. Staff has been notified to delete/ban anyone posting SPAM messages. I will not explain what constitutes SPAM, you know when you are adding value to a conversation. Members* - This group may download as MANY files as they want from FileFactory, Newsgroups and any other externally hosted file service. But as for DIRECTLY downloading magazines from our download manager, this group will be restricted to 10 files per day. That means this group has the ability to download 3,650 files over the course of a year. It may take you a little while to grab everything, but you can still more than keep up with our releases. Now I realize that many of our members may not have time to post, but are able to donate a few bucks towards operating costs. It would be unfair if I did nothing to recognize those efforts. So if you remember back in the day we had "Premium Memberships". Well we are bringing back those groups as 4 distinct Patron groups. Weekly Patron - This group is for members who just need a handful of magazines. They are allowed to directly download 200 files per week. Monthly Patron - This group is for members who want a good portion of our download manager. They are allowed to directly download 500 files per month. Yearly Patron - This group is for members who want everything in our download manager and will settle for nothing less. They are allowed to directly download without restrictions! Lifetime Patron - This group is for members who want everything in our download manager for the remainder of all time. I have also heard a rumor that members with 500+ posts on the forums get magically promoted to this group. Finally, that brings us to the remaining groups... Moderators, Super Moderators and Team Members - These groups have no restrictions on directly downloading files. They essentially have the same download rights as Lifetime Patron/Yearly Patron. None of this should be a surprise to anyone, as last year's mass email laid out that anyone who donated for us to move to the dedicated server would be rewarded with unlimited downloads. EDIT: As of 12-12-2015 I have increased the values to 5 files per day for Newcomers and 15 files per day for Members.

Good Stuff ! I have and will always donate as much as I can to support this wonderful website, for the price levels of what we get here, everything is totally worth it !

I am currently trying to track down the "missing" Nintendo Power mags as well. Once I can acquire a few I will scan them and hopefully submit them. It sucks that NP is no longer around but we have to keep what was printed alive any way we can. i'm going to be checking every "retro game store" i can find in my area to locate anything that will help. I also have some feelers out to some friends in Hawaii that might have some decent luck in finding them too. when i was there a few years back i remember quite a few retro stores having a lot of mags, just not sure if they would have what we need.