I finally got around to creating a PAD file and ran into one problem...according to PADGen I have to specify a specific .exe, .zip, etc. file for the download URL. I can't just point it to a redirection page? Here's an example of what I want for the link:

http://www.superluminal.us/Download.asp?Product=Pipeline

I would like to be able to ensure that sites that have not updated the PAD file still redirect the user to the latest version of the game, and I don't want to use the same filename for all versions of the game.

I have the above link in the PAD file now, but the PAD file program complains that it doesn't end with an .exe, .zip, or whatever. Can I just ignore that and have confidence the above won't cause any problems?

- Roulette

Hmm, I think that you MUST specify a .exe or .zip file.
For mac PAD you can specify a .sit file and so on, but I don't think a redirect page would work in any site, sorry :(

I can't just point it to a redirection page?
Most sites don't allow that.

Is there a reason for this? Specifying an exact filename has a number of disadvantages, so it's surprising that sites would not allow it. (Many do...download.com and many other sites have no problem with it.)

How do you guys determine your number of downloads (especially if you've got multiple products and can't simply divide your bandwidth by the file size) and how many hits are coming from a particular web site?

- Roulette

With webstats :)
of course the reliability of those values isn't very strong...

I believe URL rewriting (http://httpd.apache.org/docs/misc/rewriteguide.html) will work just fine. For the up-coming file hosting service, I've written a script that uses URL rewriting to get around the problem with .php files confusing some browsers. This:

http://download.domain.com/turkey.exe

Gets converted internally to:

http://download.domain.com/scripts/download.php?file=turkey.exe

As far as I can tell the rule I wrote is completely invisible to the browser (still have to test it thoroughly). You could try something like that to create aliases for the real files.