Author Topic: Roguelike distribution question  (Read 12305 times)

Brigand

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Roguelike distribution question
« on: July 23, 2014, 01:41:47 PM »
(This is similar to a question I asked in a game specific thread, but I want to ask it to the roguelike dev community in general).


So Chrome is marking my roguelike download as malware, or at least "This program is not commonly downloaded and could be dangerous." Doing a little research, it appears Google marks ANY downloadable exe as suspicious until they verify that it isn't and flag it in their database. According to their website, their only acceptable form of remediation is to add a tag to the page's html code so their scanners can flag the page as safe...except I don't own the domain - it's a free website builder program - and I don't have access to the underlying html. (per https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35179 and a bunch of other hits that echo the same thing.)

Obviously my program is not malware (obvious to me at least - who would spend years on a project and devote this much time to detailing the world simply to act as a trojan horse for some malware?)

How have you guys distributed your programs to work around this restriction? Do you purchase your url/domain? Is it acceptable to rename the exe to something else and ask the end user to name it back to exe after downloading it? (I'm guessing that's a bit much to ask.) Personally I hate installers and I think they deter people playing your game, but maybe this is a good route?

Any suggestions?

Aukustus

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Re: Roguelike distribution question
« Reply #1 on: July 23, 2014, 02:06:56 PM »
I put my stuff to dropbox and link the files in my downloads page. Works nice without any tricks.

Cfyz

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Re: Roguelike distribution question
« Reply #2 on: July 23, 2014, 03:12:27 PM »
Isn't it enough to put the game in archive? It is very common way to distribute programs too.

Brigand

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Re: Roguelike distribution question
« Reply #3 on: July 23, 2014, 05:34:36 PM »
Isn't it enough to put the game in archive? It is very common way to distribute programs too.

Do you mean like a RAR archive? As far as I can tell, Chrome will look into your archive and still flag it for containing an exe. It appears it will even extract the archive password from your upload since apparently its stored in clear text and not encrypted in any way.

reaver

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Re: Roguelike distribution question
« Reply #4 on: July 23, 2014, 05:43:53 PM »
well, you can also rename it to an unknown extension, or no extension. Kinda clunkky, but works.

mounta1nman

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Re: Roguelike distribution question
« Reply #5 on: July 24, 2014, 12:20:35 AM »
I don't know anything about weebly sites in particular, so maybe I'm missing something; but I briefly looked at a couple pages online claiming that you can edit the html pages themselves on weebly.

And there was this video too.. if you skip to the 2min mark, this guy is doing it..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9JJRriZvKY


Cfyz

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Re: Roguelike distribution question
« Reply #6 on: July 24, 2014, 10:06:35 AM »
Looks like Google products still do not look into .7z archives. This was one of the ways around similar restriction placed on exes in mail attachments and quick test has shown it works for site+chrome as well. 7-zip may be not so widespread as zip or rar but in my opinion it still better than fiddling with file extension.

Samildanach

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Re: Roguelike distribution question
« Reply #7 on: July 24, 2014, 12:13:21 PM »
Looks like Google products still do not look into .7z archives. This was one of the ways around similar restriction placed on exes in mail attachments and quick test has shown it works for site+chrome as well. 7-zip may be not so widespread as zip or rar but in my opinion it still better than fiddling with file extension.

That's a good idea. Much simpler.

mushroom patch

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Re: Roguelike distribution question
« Reply #8 on: July 24, 2014, 12:21:59 PM »
You might try public telnet.

Brigand

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Re: Roguelike distribution question
« Reply #9 on: July 24, 2014, 08:30:45 PM »
I don't know anything about weebly sites in particular, so maybe I'm missing something; but I briefly looked at a couple pages online claiming that you can edit the html pages themselves on weebly.

And there was this video too.. if you skip to the 2min mark, this guy is doing it..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9JJRriZvKY

Sadly, a paid feature. You can alter the html for the "themes", but not the header, which is where Google requires the tag. Weebly has been nice and free, but it may be time to move on :)

mounta1nman

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Re: Roguelike distribution question
« Reply #10 on: July 25, 2014, 12:38:50 AM »
Sadly, a paid feature. You can alter the html for the "themes", but not the header, which is where Google requires the tag. Weebly has been nice and free, but it may be time to move on :)

Sounds like a good idea!

I also like Aukustus' dropbox idea. I'd use that if I needed to.