I'd like to clarify a few things here and I believe the active community will understand:
The addons have been downloaded a few thousand times during the last weeks. There have been many people providing feedback which helped us finding and fixing problems. Thank you a lot for this!
However, there have been far too many people just downloading and asking for mirrors or fixing download mirrors the very moment there has been a problem on the website. Sometimes there were real problems (we moved our website, started a vps server etc) sometimes the "problems" could be tracked down to the end-user! I can only try to fix the problems on our server, so I had to come up with something different that would eventually minimize the amount of time I spent on maintaining the download links and threads.
I believe that if you find the time to monitor our site's performance and functionality
, you might as well show a little sign of gratitude by liking or tweeting our stuff. You are asked to do so one time only, not every time you want to download it.
Nice side effect is that it keeps most people away that never read before downloading but are always the very first to complain when something is not "working".
Now of course, there is still the "I want the download links" fraction that will write and spam in forums rather than click a button. They are the ones that make you read endless threads in which every second post is a waste of your precious time. Just consider how many pages this support thread has.
How many posts will you really read, how many posts will you eventually have to skip? What if you have to support and read through many different support threads, in different forums, in different languages? How much time will you have at the end of the day for actually developing and updating the add ons/ROMs etc? How will it make you feel at the end of the day, when you think "
Wow, my thread has over 200+ pages on xda, has been featured on various websites but I have received the misery of 5 likes by the average user?".
If there is something I like, I share it. If you ask in forums for download links, fixing this or that "error", it must have a value for you. If it is worthless, then do not consume download bandwidth, do not unnecessarily blow up support threads making them a pain to read. There are people paying for your mentality, one way or the other.