OK. Just to take a moment of your time. Penguinisto has kindly offered me hosting on his server and in the spirit of happily cluttering up other peoples hard drives I've accepted the offer. Hopefully I'll be able to get some html together and get the site live for the weekend. I will post and let everyone know when it goes up. Thank you very much Penguinisto, your offer is extremely generous, though you may live to regret it. :) I want to thank everybody in this thread who has either sent me or Blaze messages of support. She will respond to the emails herself later but for now she's asked I thank you all here. Thank you also everyone who has offered webspace to store various amounts of my models. Those offers are greatly appreciated. For those people who have offered space, I would ask that you keep an eye out for other freestuff providers who may be struggling and help them out. The strength of the forums is their ability to help each other and for the members to pull together. It'd be nice to see that spirit continue and enforce itself. Let's face it, without free stuff most of us would have much smaller collections of models and textures to play with. Bandwidth is and always will be a problem, but perhaps by spreading the load around some of the sites and offers that have been made by people in this thread a new trend can start. One of support. In all honesty I can think of no better way to "pay back" the people who sent abuse to generous souls like Sams3D, Fyrespirit and so many other people who are less vocal about the situation. On that note, it's nice to see people feel so passionately about this issue as it increases my faith in the forums and their members, which I confess had been flagging somewhat. I have no idea what triggers the abusive mails. I really don't. Why I and Sams3D should get them yet other people who offer freebies do not is a mystery. When I first broached this subject at 3DCommune last year the amount of emails was relatively limited, yet I was still aware of several people who were offering good to fair quality files that were getting nasty-grams in their mail. These varied from "you suck" to some fairly graphic and vicious emails. That trend if anything has increased over the last 18 months and it's sad to see it happen. I'm not alone in receiving abuse and I fail to understand the trigger that causes it. Suffice to say that there are people haunting the forums who have a problem with their own self esteem, or just like to hurl abuse at people. Hell the galleries get trolled regularly enough for little or no reason so it's not a unique situation. Little people who need to feel important in their own minds and do so by being abusive online - or in real life - exist in all walks of life. You can't avoid them but not everybody suffers from their particular kind of unpleasant attention. What motivates them is a mystery to me though there are probably a multitude of psychological explanations. It's enough that these people exist and it's more than enough that a few of them infect the cgi forums. As we've seen in this thread, the abusive behaviour is not limited to a few people or to these forums. Gaming forums and freestuff providers there get the same thing. It's sickening and very sad. I doubt that the awareness founded in this thread by Ironbear will last for long, the forums are too fickle and too active for that to last long, same with the support. But at least people are now aware of the situation of randome abuse though I have no doubt some of the vendors have already suffered from this spiteful behaviour and were aware already that some strange pathetic individuals infest the forums. Perhaps that awareness will stay with a few people and a better showing of support for freestuff and vendors will result. Who knows? Anyway. I'll take a risk here on behalf of all freestuff providers both vocal and quiet and thank everyone in this thread for the surprising show of support that has been displayed. Especially those who have received abuse through IM and emails. Yeah, I know, speaking for the mythical "all" is generally a mistake, but I think it's safe to say that some people will feel a bit better from reading this thread where before they may have felt rather alone and unappreciated. Ta muchly everyone. The emails to myself and Blaze have been greatly appreciated, as have the offers of hosting space. I just hope that this thread isn't forgotten as easily as some are, and that the statements made here hold for a while in people's minds. There's a symbiotic relationship that runs across all forum sites, but more especially so in large sites like this one. Freestuff means visitors, visitors means customers, customers means sales. Without one, the other cannot exist. Without sales these sites could not exist. Something to consider perhaps.