The Dink Network

yeoldetoast was asking about D-Mod download statistics, so I thought I'd take a look.

Unfortunately, my hosting provider (1and1) changed how they archive logs, so it is a bit difficult to have some useful statistics. I have access to the raw logs from Nov 17 2014 to today, and some old logs that were gathered from 2004-2011 accessible using awstats (which lets you see monthly statistics, but nothing based on years or comparing month-to-month).

I made a few conclusions.

1. People Download the Very Highest-Rated D-Mods

Maybe not that surprising. But, the most popular D-Mod by a longshot is Pilgrim's Quest. It has been downloaded 237 times from Nov 17 through today.

Update (refresh to see correct chart): Lyna's Story is also very popular, but CC2 1.01 is actually behind a bit (given its high 9.6 rating). I think this might be because it is advertised as a sequel; Cast Awakening Part 1 is listed as the first part of a series, and has a much higher download count.

Stone of Balance is also a bit of an outlier, with 118 downloads.

The further down the scores, though, the download count drops off fairly steeply.



2. Dink Smallwood HD Is Still Popular

Less popular than Pilgrim's Quest, but still very popular, are the D-Mods suggested by Dink Smallwood HD. Dink Smallwood HD has a built-in D-Mod browser that links to Mystery Island, The Savebot Massacre, Cloud Castle 2, and Cast Awakening Part 1. Seth hosts Mystery Island, but he steals my bandwidth for the others.

Cloud Castle 2 v1.0 was downloaded 193 times.

The Savebot Massacre was downloaded 165 times.

Initiation v1.0.3 was downloaded 160 times.



3. People Like Epics

There's an interesting cluster of epics in the download counts:

POTA: 136
FIAT: 122
SOB: 118

While they all have good scores, they don't really stand out in another way I can think of. And they don't really stand-out in the graph, now that I look at it:



I've also plotted the other Epics, for comparison. Most of them stay within the score-to-downloads cluster.

4. Alphabetization Is Key

One other curious outlier is the download counts of As Good As Eternity (103 downloads); if you go to the D-Mod list, this is the very first D-Mod that has a ranking of 9.0 or better.

I noticed this several years ago, and it was the reason I was going to rename my D-Mod series (again) to Ancient Legacy.



5. Other High-Download D-Mods

Rounding out all D-Mods with downloads of 75 or more, there is one huge outlier:



Somehow, Attack of the Evil Wizard has been downloaded 90 times, more than several higher-rated epics like Quest for Dorinthia. I have no idea why.

6. Contest Entries

People like sequels, I guess.



7. Recent Releases/Updates

Here's a cumulative sum chart of the recent releases. Curiously, today was a big day with lots of downloads across just about all releases.



8. Historical Comparison

Here's the download rate of Pilgrim's Quest in January of each year I have stats for:



Note that these numbers include partial downloads; the average file size reported is something around 20 MB for each file (and PQ is 35 MB). I believe my numbers above are full downloads only.

So, it's possible that the download counts are about the same, roughly. If PQ has been downloaded 237 times over the past two months, that's around 115 times a month. And if half of the earlier PQ downloads were terminated for one reason or another, that would be in the range of 115.

Data

D-Mod Download Totals

D-Mod Download Totals By Day

How has the "Dink Approved" stamp had 661 downloads? That's more than any other file in that period.

Edit: I had idly wondered whether my links to D-Mods in the COTPATD topics were resulting in anybody downloading them. Judging from a quick scan of the daily totals, the effect seems to be minimal if present at all for most of the D-Mods.

Can't help but notice the 33 downloads for Shadows of Death. Now, why is no one telling me how awesome the D-mod is?

Aside from my minor conceit, it's cool to see statistics like this. Dink will never die!

This is very interesting. Thanks for this. My suspicion has always been that too many people correlate the amount of forum posts here with the amount of people downloading and playing Dink/mods which is why "Dink dead!" threads pop up when forum activity is low.

It's kind of cheap of RTSoft to use your bandwidth though when Seth's making money out of it. You might want to make it so that "Savebot Massacre" downloads "The Porn Dmod" or something if it gets really bad.

The 'Dink Approved' image (and a few other images and the cotpatd HTML files) are a favorite of bots to download (like Google, yahoo, etc).

To be fair, Seth did ask me if it was ok to link directly to my files (I was just joking about the 'stealing').

And I just realised that a fair amount of those DinkHD-sourced downloads are probably from cracked APKs or whatever on iOS that Seth gets nothing for anyway. Searching for "Dink Smallwood APK" gives tons of links to download sites.

Still, it would be hilarious if it made it download the Porn Dmod instead.

Gotta love those GoDly stats, 486 downloads total, counting every version! And I thought no one played it.

Those stats are a bit meatier than I expected. Umm... Are some duckers actually downloading Bincabbi from files.dinknetwork.com/dmods? Those had better be bots.

I now have bincabbi because I don't know what the shit it is.

Ok, now to review it -

"You can't save (although I thought I did I guess) and there's dragons you can't realistically resist consistently enough to defeat them. Poop game."

Why is it gone sort of?

It's kind of comforting as a D-Mod author to see people are downloading both HHs nearly every day. Makes me feel like all the work wasn't for nothing, which I couldn't confirm previously. Although it would still be nice to have more feedback. It's a shame very few of these people playing the D-Mods seem to be interested in joining the forum, reviewing and maybe even making D-Mods themselves.

I put my email address in the dmod.diz of Malachi the Jerk, and I've gotten several emails about it as a result from people who aren't members of the forum.

I'm impressed by how many downloads still happen! Thanks for the stats, Redink!

Really interesting stuff. I've often wondered about how many downloads d-mods get.

Shameful - and surprising - that something as good as Crosslink has under 40 downloads, I must say.

Indeed, it's actually a bit depressing how few downloads some of these have.

That's cool. The only thing I'd based my idea of how many people were downloading these things was this thread from almost 10 years ago, which might make an interesting comparison:

Contest

Why is it gone sort of?

No idea why it's sort of gone, rather than really gone. My other dmods vanished more successfully. (I asked for all of them to be removed in, I dunno, 2004) But I'm not really complaining, it's actually rather amusing. =)

Also, I can't believe everyone complains about the damn dragons.

Shameful - and surprising - that something as good as Crosslink has under 40 downloads, I must say.

Are you mistaking it for all-time downloads? That's just in the last TWO MONTHS. A demo from 1999 is still getting downloaded every other day.

Shameful - and surprising - that something as good as Crosslink has under 40 downloads, I must say.

Actually, I find it a huge (and quite positive) surprise that a D-Mod that's 15 years old is still downloaded nearly 40 times a month. Not to even mention the fact it's a Demo. Personally, I never even found that D-Mod so great and the amazing stuff it has isn't really that amazing by today's standards anymore. So yeah, I find it absolutely mindblowing it's still downloaded so much.

In fact, if I understand the list correctly, an amazing, much younger D-Mod such as I, Kara Gu has been downloaded less times. That's a pretty impressive feat for Crosslink.

Here's something baffling: why do old versions get downloaded so much?

For example, there's 30 downloads here for Malachi the Jerk 1.00, the buggiest initial version that was replaced very quickly way back in February. What were people doing downloading that version in November and later?

Oh, is that a month? Didn't take in the stats properly.

That's pretty cool then. Much higher than I thought.

Huh; googlebot downloads D-Mods. That's definitely skewing a lot of the download counts, then. Damn. Here's a sample log entry:

66.249.69.114 - - [01/Jan/2015:23:04:07 -0500] "GET /malachi_the_jerk-v1_00.dmod HTTP/1.1" 200 3272587 files.dinknetwork.com "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)" "-"

Looks like there are a few bot types:

162.243.103.80 - - [01/Jan/2015:03:59:19 -0500] "GET /malachi_the_jerk-v1_00.dmod HTTP/1.1" 200 3272587 files.dinknetwork.com "http://files.dinknetwork.com/" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; spbot/4.4.2; +http://OpenLinkProfiler.org/bot )" "-"

180.76.6.28 - - [06/Jan/2015:12:43:23 -0500] "GET /malachi_the_jerk-v1_00.dmod HTTP/1.1" 200 3272587 files.dinknetwork.com "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Baiduspider/2.0; +http://www.baidu.com/search/spider.html)" "-"

144.76.182.139 - - [30/Nov/2014:19:52:31 -0500] "GET /malachi_the_jerk-v1_00.dmod HTTP/1.0" 200 3272587 files.dinknetwork.com "http://files.dinknetwork.com/" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; SEOkicks-Robot; +http://www.seokicks.de/robot.html)" "-"

62.210.82.224 - - [19/Nov/2014:15:18:19 -0500] "GET /malachi_the_jerk-v1_00.dmod HTTP/1.1" 200 3272587 www.files.dinknetwork.com "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; WBSearchBot/1.1; +http://www.warebay.com/bot.html)" "-"

144.76.167.214 - - [01/Dec/2014:14:25:19 -0500] "GET /malachi_the_jerk-v1_00.dmod HTTP/1.1" 206 262145 files.dinknetwork.com "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; SISTRIX Crawler; http://crawler.sistrix.net/)" "-"

68.180.228.235 - - [18/Dec/2014:10:26:23 -0500] "GET /malachi_the_jerk-v1_00.dmod HTTP/1.1" 200 3272587 files.dinknetwork.com "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)" "-"

Edit: I just uploaded a robots.txt file to ask bots to stop downloading files.

It also turns out that someone is hot-linking to the Dink Approved image.

What in the hell could Google want with Dmods?

That's highly disturbing that they'd have a bot to download from here of all places for no reason. I guess the employees want something to play? I guess? But then that raises the question - how many random sites do Googlebots fly around in downloading everything? It's gross.

nice i just downloaded the all high rated dmods in one go probably two years ago havent updated any of the newer updates to them i guess

>It also turns out that someone is hot-linking to the Dink Approved image.

Now there's a delightful opportunity to change the destination.

While we're at it, you wouldn't happen to have a break-down of visitors by country do you?

I don't have a break down by country; 1and1's built in analytics are pretty terrible.

Without Google's bots there wouldn't be a search engine, they're there to organize the internet and they're not playing DMODs. It's not only Google's search engine that utilises web crawlers. If you make your site accessible for Google, Yahoo etc. via robots, these things happen and it's not even serious. All they're doing is to organize for your site and content so it can be searched for on a search engine.

Without Google's bots there wouldn't be a search engine, they're there to organize the internet and they're not playing DMODs.

Why in the hell would they need the files for that? That doesn't seem like how it would go.

The bots probably can't tell what sort of file they're downloading until they access it as .dmod isn't a common extension.