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Why do I need to register with HPC:Factor to...?

These days is seems that you have to register to use everything on the Internet, and unfortunately HPC:Factor is no exception. This page aims to explain why it is necessary for user registration in order to use some (but not all) of our services, and what benefits there are for you as a user in registering with us.

Contents

Qualifying Accounts, Subscriptions & Donations

As a result of abuse, we have been forced to implement a qualification process in order to protect our 20 year old community. As of January 2019:

If you register an account with HPC:Factor, you do not automatically qualify for access to the HPC:Factor download centre. Please Do Not Register in our community unless you wish to be a genuine part of it - you are wasting your time.

You can bypass the restriction by

  1. Becoming a +Subscriber, a premium member of the site. All +Subscriber memberships have de-restricted access to site downloads as well as other functionality and benefits.
    View: Find out more about becoming a Premium Member

  2. Having an account that is at least that has contributed in a positive way to our community via on-topic interactions in the forum. Posts that are deleted by moderators do not count towards your qualification, neither do any posts in the Off-Topic forum.

HPC:Factor Download Centre

There is no conspiracy here, and we know that you hate having to register for things on the Internet; we do too!

In one form or another HPC:Factor has existed since late 1999, and in those years we have gone from being a member of a thriving community - one of many, to becoming the last any only significant player left in the Windows CE Handheld PC world.

Despite the fact that more and more of our peers have left, and despite the legacy nature of the community and its dwindling long-term subscribers, over the years we have continued to innovate, increasing the range of services that we offer the community, increasing and entrenching our position as the last of the great Windows CE H/PC sites.

While we have been improving our services for our members, at the same time:

  • Regular Forum membership has reduced over the last 2 years
  • Page impressions dropped between 2007 and 2008 and looks set to do so again in 2009
  • Despite this Bandwidth consumption has increased by over 30% each year since 2005
  • Binary file hot-linking has become such a problem for us that in June 2009 almost 25% of the visitors to hpcfactor.com were never even viewing a page on HPC:Factor
  • We are not supported by advertising revenue or sponsorship. The owners of the site pay all of its costs out of their own pocket

We pay for this. So what are we paying for? The owners of other websites to receive the credit for providing access to files while we pay for them to do that? The convenience of you, a random Internet user who is not a member of our community to be able to click on a link from a Google search or someone else's web page, download whatever file you are looking for and never participate in our community?

Yes; but not any more. What would you do if you were in our situation? Money is money wherever you are, and these are hard times. Your convenience is not worth our hardship. By breaking hotlinks to content on HPC:Factor we have significantly reduced our bandwidth bill. By enforcing registration and removing the convenience of having direct access to hyperlinks we have reduced downloading, particularly of the thoughtless kind. By asking for donations we are asking you to participate in the maintenance of this site so that even if you are not a member you can contribute to it and help us to maintain our services - even if there is a mild inconvenience of having to register first.

HPC:Factor does not charge for the services that we offer, we do not profit from running this site and this site is not supported by advertising revenue. We do not collect personal information for any financial or competitive benefits and we certainly do not sell your information.

View: Registration
View: Membership Benefits

Forums

Registration is required on the forums to combat SPAM.

When we originally brought the forums on-line, registration was optional. Over the years people and SPAM-bots progressively started to exploit this more and more. Eventually, despite our best security methods it became very clear that the time that it was taking administrators to clean up the selfishness of a minority just wasn't worth it. Reluctantly we enforced registration as a precursor to posting a new thread and the time commitment for our administrators and moderators fell sharply.

Despite the fact that this change has been enforced for several years, it hasn't stopped the SPAMmers from attempting to bombard our forums several thousand times an hour with junk.

Forum registration prevents you from having to see mindless, offensive, vulgar and generally anti-social content on the Internet. E-Mail validation is part of that, with us on-average deleting over 100 unverified accounts each month; accounts that for the most part were created by SPAM-bots.

HPC:Factor does not charge for the services that we offer, we do not profit from running this site and this site is not supported by advertising revenue. We do not collect personal information for any financial or competitive benefits and we certainly do not sell your information.

View: Registration
View: Membership Benefits

H/PC:Update

Our motives for requiring registration for accessing H/PC:Update are partly because of wanting to protect our downloads, partly to encourage people to explore H/PC:Update and the site rather than hot-linking directly onto a specific page in H/PC:Update but mainly because we tailor the H/PC:Update catalogue specifically to the needs of each and every user.

The customised approach that we take towards H/PC:Update means that as a service it utilises significantly more server memory than other services on HPC:Factor. By enforcing registration we can minimise the load on the server and ensure that we can offer you a good service when you pay us a visit.

View: Registration
View: Membership Benefits