It’s been great to see the positive response to the new Download Center archive. It was shared on Hacker News earlier this week, and was just covered by The Register. (They’ve also positively covered Legacy Update a few times in the past, most recently after we released Legacy Update 1.12.)
I don’t usually talk about these things because money isn’t the point of this project, but I wanted to add an amusing tidbit that the traffic spike from Hacker News brought 42,810 page views to the Download Center homepage in 24 hours according to Cloudflare, yet, Google AdSense shows only 3,738 page views. So in case you were wondering how much of Hacker News uses an ad blocker (I know you weren’t), the answer is, 91%. Also, I didn’t even realise it was on Hacker News until almost a day later, so, good to know my infrastructure handles that kind of traffic spike!
Overall, we’ve been hitting an average of around 900,000 – 1 million daily requests, most of which is Windows Update traffic, search engine bots, and AI training/search bots. I’m kinda ok with the search/AI bots because it doesn’t seem to be causing any issues, and it is a good thing that people are finding a legitimate download source when asking AI, rather than something sketchy.
Hopefully soon, I’ll start loading more data into the archive. A few people have helped point out data that was incomplete (particularly missing file listings), or downloads that were missing entirely. We won’t be able to get all of it due to the state of the archives being incomplete, but the aim is to still try to get as close as we possibly can.
Thanks to everyone who helped to spread the word!