PCGamingWiki:Editing guide/Files

Files is a subsection of the IP Board community site and serves as the file repository area of PCGamingWiki, accessible through your personal PCGamingWiki account. Our goal is to make mods, patchers, trainers and other useful PC gaming tools available without relying on third-party hosting.

Uploading files

Please feel free to upload useful files to our Files section. The file will be held in a moderation queue and approved by a member of staff. If your file isn't approve within 24 hours please visit the #support channel on our Discord.

If your file isn't approved, it will be commented on and hidden by a member of staff if it requires amendments. If amendments are not made in a timely manner, it will be deleted.

Password protection policy

Hosting files on PCGamingWiki comes with a set of risks. Any of our hosted files getting detected as malware or viruses allows for the possibility of Google delisting the entire website and domain from Google search results, and putting the platform on the malware filter list used by Chrome and Firefox by default, preventing access unless explicitly allowed by the user. This has happened to communities such as the WSGF in July 2019. It is also a preventative measure taken by communities such as FearlessRevolution, which hosts trainers that get flagged as malware based on their hooking and other behavior, similarly to mods that come as packed patchers and trainers hosted on PCGamingWiki.

Therefore PCGamingWiki has taken a pre-emptive measure of password protecting files, with the policy being:

When uploading mods, patchers, trainers or other tools known to be safe but falsely triggering some anti-virus software, pack the files into a 7zip archive and protect with the password pcgw and put the password in the file description. Failing to do so may prevent the files from getting approved.

VirusTotal allows a file to be scanned by a variety of anti-virus engines, which can be used to determine whether password protection is necessary.

Virus detected in PCGamingWiki file

Some files on PCGamingWiki may be flagged by anti-virus or anti-malware software as being malicious. This is usually because PC game fixes may contain code which modifies computer program behavior that can sometimes seem similar to a virus.

Our policy is that the files hosted by PCGamingWiki, like everything else on the internet, are downloaded at the user's own risk. We rely on the community to create and share fixes, and also for the community to point out potential problems with files.

That being said, we do not require file creators to submit or open source the code for their fixes because this is too onerous on the file creators. It is up to the user to make the decision whether they trust file creator.

If you suspect that a file contains a virus, please make a note on our #support channel on Discord. Repeated submissions about a file not passing 'X' antivirus suite are not appropriate. Many of our files do not pass these arbitrary virus scans (which often change over time), and at the end of the day, it is the user's decision whether to download a file from our site.

Report a false positive to vendors

File uploaders can utilize VirusTotal to detect which vendor is detecting the file as malicious, and then report it as a false positive to that vendor. Note however that reporting it as a false positive is not a guarantee that it is removed as a false positive, but it will ensure that the vendor takes a closer look at the file and possibly adds an exclusion to the file in newer virus definitions.

References

Editing guide

System requirements

Conclusion and examples