Just want to add a tad bit of clarification with the Iris/Sodium fiasco. They didn't decide to leave Curseforge due to the reuploads, but because of a bunch of technical issues with the new website, which was the last straw for the full move to Modrinth. Only after they archived Iris and Sodium (which they did to make sure old modpacks still work), Curseforge fully deleted them and allowed anyone to reupload the mods. So Curseforge basically did this to keep Iris and Sodium on their platform, and/or to bully them into staying on Curseforge.
As a modder myself, I thank you for making this video. It sheds light on how ignorant these people behind the websites really are to the feelings of the original creators.
@@William0271 you do realize that what they are doing is stealing money off of what people could be making. the reposting websites do not give profits back to the developers
@@sierraa72 That has nothing to do with being ignorant though. Do you know what "ignorant" even means? Not trying to be rude, I'm just pretty sure you don't know the meaning of the word (I guess you could say that you're ignorant to it lol)
I'm glad Modrinth is becoming more popular now, it's such a nice fluid site that I've never had a single issue with, never had to watch a single ad or had any real concerns.
@@deltainfinium869 uhm, modrinth is working on their own launcher, but atm prism is the best option as you can update singular mods in the launcher itself, besides changing modpack versions of packs from various sources
@@starrymohannad eh, spyware might be a little bit strongly worded, but it definitely runs when you don't want it to and has access to files that I don't need a Minecraft mod manager to have access to. Honestly I would be fine using curseforge as designed if I didn't have to deal with that launcher. As it is I go through the hoops to use gdlauncher instead. Amazon saw that they had controll of Minecraft mods and got greedy.
Glad you mentioned modrinth. I've been using the site for mods and other stuff for a while now and its honestly one of the cleanest and smoothest running websites I've ever used for MC related stuff.
Really? I've found it to be janky, inconsistently performing, and lacking in absolutely basic features like tracking dependents to find addons. Their UI is also extremely user hostile with many redundant clicks and lack of clarity about downloads.
A lot of times people are also led to download from these sources as curseforge sometimes simply doesn't host the version of the mod they want, but then again, those versions are probably unavailable for a reason.
I've been developing smaller mods for awhile now and this issue is far more rampant than most would think. Even when my mods having first started with only 2 or 3 thousand downloads to their name, they were still stolen and spread across these websites. What's even worse is when youtubers or individuals making content with your mods then link back to these pages insinuating that its the original download point. When your a small author there's nothing to really do as your word goes nowhere in the large scheme of things. I'm glad more people are speaking out about this now.
Yeah it feels terrible asf, in the old days i usually create mod for my own convenient, by time i get the urge to post it but due to how often mod theft is ive got no courage, right now im creating an ultra large modpack containing many new biomes, mobs and 4 new dimensions, in this mod mobs that i added mostly bosses and mini bosses such as in the dragon valley biome there are many reptiles and even dragons, the dragons there counts as tameable mini-bosses and bosses
Kinda surreal how things are getting worse and worse in this community. It's almost cartoonish at this point. Makes me wish Minecraft wasn't basically the only game like itself.
You have to keep in mind though this is the Iris dev team we're talking about. Their mods are GPL-3 licensed and redistribution is explicitly legal and the entire issue was caused by them deliberately violating the curseforge terms of service. Their behavior here and tweets is clearly as bad faith as their own deliberately deceptive project website. The fact is their own behavior has been as consistently toxic as the community they created, which quickly fractured yet further because of that very drama-ridden toxicity. There's a reason the saying is that forge developers talk about minecraft, and fabric developers talk about how much they hate forge developers and players.
Now more than ever, it seems Curseforge needs to work on its PR. Have you considered the possibility for Mojang to host their own official mod platform for Java? It won't be a mod system like reinventing fabric or forge, just an official mod repo.
curseforge doubled down because the point of open source licenses like that are that people can take and reupload them wherever, that's the point of choosing the open source licenses they have. That and someone's ability to modify these things however they see fit, and redistribute those modifications even with the original source code. Redistributing with malware is obviously wack, but else i'm not sure why an open source developer would care about reposts. I dont think curseforge is as in the wrong as you protray them, and i think you miss the philosophy of these kinds of open source licenses to begin with. Irus in their tweet said that they were illegally reuploading irus. However, Irus is literally wrong about this, the open source license they selected allows for such a reupload. Curseforge was correct in saying that it's not illegal, and if irus wanted it to be illegal they could've chosen a license that gives them more control over the distribution of their open source code. The power is in their hands. This is really weird fear mongering, and curseforge is fine.
Yep. Also, CF only took down the Iris/Sodom pages because the devs broke ToS by linking to modrinth in the descriptions after archiving their files. Do I personally agree with the rule? No. But it is a rule that enforced on CF.
People need to know about this. CurseForge's actions on their pages, on the re-uploaders are completely fine. Letting those things to happen is their (mod authors) own fault. I'm not even sure they'll make more profit on Modrinth (100% doesn't mean more). Also CurseForge is working hard to improve their website this year, issues like versioning scheme, markdown, ... is going to be fixed. Too bad they have already done reputation damages hence people are moving away.
Damn, it is actually really disheartening to see the minecraft modding community being plagued by piracy. I sincerely hope that something can be done to prevent this from going on any further
Even if the Iris Shaders is open source, you'd think they could take down people impersonating them as that would be a trademark issue, not a copyright one. Like when an open source project forks, they usually change the name in some way.
I've just given up on modding Minecraft and it breaks my heart. I'm just so tired of the version divide, the split between Forge and Fabric, the bloat of content in a given mod with no mod configs, grind being confused with progression, and battling for a sweet spot of solid performance. It's just one massive headache to deal with that doesn't feel good to overcome anymore. I'm hoping Hytale succeeds due to the way they're handling modding, it just sounds like a breath of fresh air.
Ngl sounds like you’re crying cuz you can’t be fucked doing your own due diligence. It’s mc modding, not really that deep. Just download the mods you like and get rid of the ones you end up not liking.
These foreign sites sending malware to consumers and reposting developers content have been quite an issue lately across the entire game dev sphere. I'm not endorsing anything but i'm surprised there hasn't been an organization of people dedicated to fighting it similarly to the people attacking pay to win servers.
When I was a kid I tried downloading mods on my moms hotel office computer. It was one of these websites and the malware on the hotels servers were so bad that they had to be replaced
11:40 just because a mod is open source doesn’t give people the right to commit trademark infringement, break licensing, and spread malware. This is obvious fud from a team that doesn’t understand the legal implications, and is trying to avoid taking action.
Tbh, as a mod dev I don’t rly care about reuploading my mods, is it rly big deal? Do they actually have such a big amount downloads? Don’t thinks so. Also I don’t think it is possible to fight it, contact every single scam website to ask them to delete mod? Even if they would delete them (most of them wouldn’t), who has such amount of time? As for me, the only way to handle it, is if Minecraft creators (YTubers, streamers, content developers) will mention officially recognized sources (CF/modrinth) every time they mention any type of downloadable content. So players will never even think they could download it somewhere else.
As a mods user i can understand how painful when mod maker try to remove they own mod from the web and you just want get it just because you RP-self-made-modpack based around it. god bless the reuploaders.
Seeing this happen to curseforge is incredibly worrying- luckily I've started to make my way over to just using Modrinth but.... What about the Curseforge Launcher? I use it for its various separate instances, I get it is probably still safe to use since the main issue is just downloading mods themselves... But it still makes me nervous...
Ive pretty much always used MultiMC and will so forever. Only downside is it doesn't support curseforge modpacks, but ATLauncher does still, and i dont see any glaring issues with it. I found the curseforge launcher very 'sus' due to the aggression of whatever overwolf is and the confusing UI and built in ads. But to answer directly, the curseforge launcher I agree is probably safe, but i wouldnt recommend staying with it.
Modrinth will have its own launcher, but it's still in development. In the meantime, I've used Prism Launcher, but I've heard that ATLauncher is also good.
I downloaded from 9Minecraft and had to delete it all a few weeks back. I only had the mods for a few hours, and my 7 hour long full system virus scan reported nothing thankfully. Still, it was a big scare.
Its hard to take these sites down legally but maybe we can send reports to google to lower the position in search of these sites or to even de list them. Some cybersecurity companies also have the power to place warning signs on pages that show "This page is not safe" before accessing them. Any time users have managed to take down sites its usually through these methods. Source: I'm in the industry.
I'm surprised Planet Minecraft wasn't mentioned at all in this video. Not as a shady website or a reputable website. I've used Planet Minecraft for like 11 years, and now I'm not so sure about how trustworthy it is.
I used to use 9minecraft solely because trying to find mods on Minecraft forums was such a chore. (This was before curseforge, where the forum site was the main distributer for mods and stuff)
With the curse forge thing, people can literally check the download number and when the mod was uploaded. Like thats kinda obvious and easy to find the original mod on curseforge, not that hard
I've had to send a DMCA takedown to 9Minecraft for stealing my texture packs, as I only post on PMC and Modrinth, and they didn't even port the texture quality correctly 🤦
This is especially damaging to people who make Minecraft Maps. While Minecraft Mods are stolen and given some popularity, people who make Maps are given less attention because these maps aren't given much of a view. When 9Minecraft uploads it, because of the connection between it and how it has the Google search engine implemented into it, it can go over stuff such as Planet Minecraft or even Minecraft Maps. Some people I know such as Dominexis and Command Realm are people who get highly affected by this.
I would also like to state the fact that curseforge recently went under a change in their UI and developing partner , their new partner is overwolf which is known to be extremely MALICIOUS with their work
@@Lucas_____ cursed forge is owned by M.O.B.A network, a multi million dollar company that owns thousands of services and website, you're safe to use it. If somehow you're lucky and get malware from the app itself congratulations, you get to sue the company and get yourself a massive bag.
@@Lucas_____ curseforge is safe, and in most cases the only safe place to download mods. It usually offers the most revenue for devs too - though, that's mainly because of popularity. Modrinth offers a better split.
Thx for making me remember my childhood days. Back then I didn't have Minecraft. I was still underage to ask my parents to buy the game minecraft. My sister found 9minecraft. They gave us a cracked launcher where they provide us a variety of modpacks. Starting from ftb, crazy craft, kraken mod and others. It was fun to be able to play minecraft when you dont have one. Didn't know it had maleware until now. Thanks for the information.
its so normal since so many kids play minecraft and for some reason actually have a pc on their own so they thought it was a good idea to make viruses and money off of trolling children i wont even talk about the mobile minecraft since way more kids are there, oh the ADS while installing addons and such and some of them dont even work and most of them are ENTITIES
Bro are you stupid? Average mha fan lmao. Misterepic isn’t experienced with this shit and can’t mama a good suggestion. He is just trying to make people aware of the situation
Curseforge and modrinth are safe to use. Curseforge is shitty at times, don't get me wrong - but it's still the best option for mod devs and players alike.
Man the Cursefire one makes no bloody sense. I have to be honest.. It makes no real sense past them stealing what they think are ... abandoned mods. Which makes me slightly sad at the people whom have downloaded mine from there played a gimed out version. I suspect the only thing you can do is basically litter bomb your own readme with self links to the official landing pages of your github & distrobution hub for the jar file. - I seriously got an insane chunk of downloads (for my size) for the LTS version of my chocobo mod, (before I came back & did the 1.19.3 version & did even more fixing and tweaking) all because the README I did for it used curseforge links to the mods & modpacks. That said though, I genuinely feel bad for players who use cursefire, or 9minecraft, as even outside the heightened risks of malware... you're often SOL when it comes to features, bug fixes & even entire version releases. It's a rough issue.
It's definitely bad what these sites are doing but sometimes they are the last option since the mod is otherwise lost to history and only for example 9minecraft still has a copy of a specific older version. As a private modpack author I primarily use curseforge and the mod's site but as I said especially for older game versions many mods are rare to find.
The last mod I downloaded was flans mod for 1.8.9. I have since removed all minecraft mods, forge, and moved computers. The family computer I used back then had its keyboard disabled for one user and is painfully slow on every other user.
I used to be active in the texture pack forum on mcf back in 2013-2015ish, and this was already a massive issue during at least the latter half of that time. It doesn't sound like anything has changed at all. It's been a literal decade and we're still at the point of "it would be basically impossible to pursue this legally because the site is hosted in a country that won't accommodate." It's truly maddening, but mostly just sad.
ive known about 9minecraft for a long time. i've been downloading mods since i was 6 and i've always avoided it. it looked shady even then. every fake website looked like it was baked in 2011 and never updated, a big red flag.
Thx for the great vid notice MrEpic i now know about this curseforge issue and will still use curseforge but i will look at the creators as well to ensure safety (also its really sad how iris has moved from CF but ill just use modrinth for that instead) Edit: as i move my self to modrinth i will still keep my forge mods for a modpack i created i wonder if thats ok?
Its not just mods that are having these problems like these. I see a lot of software being uploaded on weird websites below the original link for example malwarebytes,obs and many more have been uploaded to a seemingly 3rd party publishing website
ive only really used 9minecraft for shader stuff thankfully. I'll never use the website ever again. I'm sorry and thank you modders for all your hard work!
What I started doing a while was go through one of those minecraft mod sites (Minecraft9 I think it was?) and just scroll through to look at the mods since it has bigger thumbnails with images that actually show more of the mod instead of just a title image like Curse, and has a small section of article of what the mod is about. Then I would copy the name and go through curse to find it. It sucks because personally the sites were a bit more user friendly and that is what helped me get into multiple mods at the time. I still do this when I don't find a mod off of RU-vid.
For Minecraft I only use CurseForge, Modrinth and Planet Minecraft, but it is good to know about the extension. I hope they decide to go back and maintain it again, 'cause it's crucial for anyone who enjoys modding and actively do it for lots of games.
As a mod developer I can understand how painful it can be if your mod is reposted, it takes a really long time to make mods and to have someone steal credit or associate you with a virus hurts
@@raghav1026 And the mod dev is making money off the original game's creator. pretty scummy thing to do? Which is why some game devs wanted mods to be banned in the past. Here's a little secret: Publicity = good. If you get your mod posted everywhere you will end up with more downloads, if you curtail it people will make their own better mod with time out of sheer annoyance. the devs are just greedy and frankly mostly just are control freaks that don't understand that users ALLWAYS prioritise their own comfort. Little test: which games do you think do better over time? Those with mod support or those without? Easy answer as all the games with the best support still have huge audiances today, whereas the other just...went away. similarly those mod devs that tried to control everything and get paid for their shit mostly just go away, where the others stay and prosper. Minecraft is far from the first game where this has come up.
@@nonyabisness6306 that is an absolutely brain dead take on this problem. mod developers make money off of something THEY make for the game. the mod dev made the mod. now on the other hand these random websites are making money off of something they had no involvement in... if you cant see the issue here then you are a little special to say the least
@@nonyabisness6306 Did you even watch the video. Also mod makers don’t make money off of the game. They don’t demand you pay to use their mods. Most have patreon supporters that willingly support them because of the great work they do. That’s not making money off of the game. Also publicity = good, but malware = bad. Imagine being a mod dev and getting angry comments from people who downloaded off of these sites because they didn’t know any better and got malware on their PC, that gives the mod devs a bad name. What these sites are doing is literally illegal.
The only past instance I can think of is years ago when someone managed to sneak some malicious code into a build of Tinker's Construct without the main dev realizing. Curse does have a verification system for all uploads, but that one likely passed by, due to it being from an extremely well known modder who has done nothing wrong in the past. Luckily this was discovered very quickly.
I remember once I downloaded mods from this specific minecraft site where *All Mod Downloads were .exe files* which is the biggest red flag ever, my toddler brain back then didn't even give that a thought so that was the main way I installed mods for a while, to this day I'm still surprised that website didn't give me a virus.
@@squabbledOwO I'm pretty sure it didn't since I never had performance problems on that PC, plus this was back in 2010 - 2014, so crypto mining viruses weren't as widespread as they are today
@@squabbledOwO You would know if it was a cryptominer. Yes cryptominers work in the background, but they use absurd amounts of power causing noticeable lag and other issues that would quickly be noticed.
Dang, now I feel really bad for downloading mods from sites like these. I had no idea those types of websites were malicious. Thanks for shedding light on this, I'll definitely be more careful and mindful from now on. Now that I think about it, so many mods I've tried to download previously would always crash my game. I always thought it was because of my computer, as it's just a regular Mac and not a gaming computer, but now I'm wondering if this is a reason why it happened
It happened to me, but I always solved it because most of the time 9minecraft doesn't update the mods, so I always ended up finding the mod on curseforge and downloading the latest version and the game stopped crashing
Back in the days of 1.8, 9minecraft was my go to mod site and i only recently learned the truth. Thankfully i switched to curseforge over 6 years ago but it’s scary how many of these sites are out there.
I'm honestly just relieved I had my dad who was already in the modding community. He told me and my sister where to go and we've been following him. He just kinda guides us through everything when it comes to modding things.
Thank you for making this video! It's an important issue that has plagued the comunnity for many, many years, yet unfortunately has not shown many signs of slowing down. Hopefully sharing this message will help.
The only reason to use these kinds of sketchy websites is if you're searching for a dead mod that only they have. I think I've gotten a few of such pieces of the past from them. As for good mod sources, Modrinth has been my go-to for quite some time now.
It's like going to a landfill to try and salvage small pieces of electronics that are no longer in production. Only do it if you know what you're doing, and only if you have sufficient security in a worse case scenario.
Crime groups and lone criminals in general are like mushrooms. Even if you catch them it wont matter as they’ll either spring up again elsewhere or some other group will take there place. It really is disgraceful how so many people are ok with doing this regardless of reasons.
The problem with saying "don't download from those sites" is that a lot of the time, they're the only source for mod/texture pack you're trying to find, especially if it's for older versions. If every mod/texture pack maker actually kept an archive of the things they made, people (like me) wouldn't have to resort to downloading from sketchy websites.
@@Elian504 ehh, not always true. sometimes a dev makes a port (or in most cases just a mod) and then deletes it, thus making the sketchy site the ONLY way to get it(unless you somehow find someone with the original file...and even then good luck. er, both on finding them and it not being malware.
@@Elian504 Definitely not true. Older versions of mods (namely beta 1.7.3 mods/TP) are almost always either lost to time, stuck on an HDD in a landfill, or on said sketchy sites. It's very hard to find very old versions of LB Photo Realism, KDS Photo Realism, etc. without the use of potentially malicious sites.
@@nasrinatiyeh how do you say not true when you mentioned the same sketch sites? sometimes there is just no other source for the old mods we used to have once before, if getting from any of them 9minecraft is best chances vs dead official source
but why? what reason do they have to private the mods on there? people can still download them(or if people already downloaded them, they can still see the mod's name and page) so why remove them?
in theory, the only protection for open source mods to prevent reuploads like this is filing the name as a trademark. but that costs money which modders usually don't have to throw around. and if it is some page like 9minecraft, an international trademark suit will be expensive.
I can guarantee you you won't be able to file a trademark for a mod without the owner of the game you're modding sueing you into oblivion, and i don't mean the game.
@@nonyabisness6306 why? of couse you can't trademark the games name. but the mod is its own creation, with copyright and a name, that can be trademarked. of course, that won't stop the shady pages like 9minecraft, but curseforge should respect that. and even for the owner of the game itself are some benefits to this: nobody wants a game where you easily run into the problem of having malware-mods.
I HIGHLY suggest, no matter where you get a file, at the very least scan it with virus total. And make sure you have a good antivirus. No one is immune to viruses.
