365 vweaiona of British Midlands on the DLS?

I got curious and searched to see how many copies of this route were on the DLS and there are 365 of them. Interestingly, about 95% of them are unchanged copies uploaded by seemingly random usernames. Clicking on the username to see the profile of the user, I discovered that almost all the users joined the forum on the same day they last accessed the forum. So it seems like these users are all ghost accounts created years ago that never again accessed the forum but are currently uploading unchanged versions of Auran routes to the DLS. What is up with that? I'm not willing to download one of them to see if they have something embedded in them like a message.

Has anyone ever downloaded one of these routes?

William

More likely those are temp mobile accounts uploading their version of the route.
There are several City and Country USA, Outback Australia, Highland Valley, and the other routes from UTC that are uploaded as well.

Cheers

People using the DLS as a file store to save copies of routes?
Or Ipad and Android users doing the same.
As I don't have either I have no idea what routes are included but seems likely something like British Midlands given they use old tech.
I avoid anything that has multiple versions from unknown creators that are clearly cloned.

I thought of that for some newer ones but here is one that makes me wonder. Username 666666 created in 2011 but uploaded a copy of British Midlands in October 2020. Did it take them 9 years to discover the upload function of the app? I also thought of Steam accounts but searching for that username on the DLS shows only one route uploaded. I checked several others and it is the same, just one route uploaded one time. I would think that if they were using the upload to store backups of their route as they worked on it there would be multiple uploads.

Now I spent 18 years as an admin for an ISP and I'm more than a little paranoid of seeing weird behavior on ftp servers but still I know that many people use really weak passwords and their accounts get hacked. Just seems odd to me.


William

At one point, CityCountryUSA was leading.

https://forums.auran.com/trainz/sho...City-amp-Country-USA-384-British-Midlands-312

Whatever the reason it is a bit annoying.

I've found 371 with British Midlands in the title, Custom search, On DLS - True > And Not > Name - British Midlands gets rid of them.

Most appear to be 3.6 or 3.8, 3.8 only used for Android and ipad and Trainz Simulator 2 Mac.

Really why there needs to be a separate Android/iPad DLS.

Mind the PC stuff is not exempt, some of the Russian assets have been cloned numerous times, making it difficult to work out which are the bona fide originals and which are the copies.

Vern said:

Really why there needs to be a separate Android/iPad DLS.

Mind the PC stuff is not exempt, some of the Russian assets have been cloned numerous times, making it difficult to work out which are the bona fide originals and which are the copies.

Click to expand...

Yup. I said that longtime ago regarding the mobile stuff. The Russian clones have clogged my PC as well because if a route has them as dependencies. They maybe the same, but since they have different KUIDs, they're considered new items. It's a pain and I can't see a workaround for it unless we can get an aliasing system to work with assets. If the asset isn't built-in and there are a gazillion forms of it, we can pick one and then alias all the others to that one asset and remove the meshes and stuff. Depending upon the size of the original asset, this can mean saving disk space for those that have small hard drives.