The mods you cannot download, and why they still exist
There is a category of mod in every large catalogue that nobody likes to talk about: the ones you can search for, read about, look at screenshots of — and never download. Not because anything is broken. Because the author said no, and the catalogue kept the page anyway. We have 2,982 of them on the Bedrock side. This is what they are, what they cost, and what happened when we stopped putting them in front of people.
Two different kinds of empty
Out of 47,580 Bedrock mods, 7,895 have no file we can hand you. They split into two groups that look identical to a player and are completely different underneath.
- 2,982 — consent withdrawn. These are CurseForge mods whose authors switched off third-party distribution. The file exists, it is perfectly fine, and we are not permitted to serve or mirror it. This is not a technical problem and it has no technical fix.
- 4,913 — no file resolved. These come from aggregator sites where our scraper found the page but could not resolve an actual download. Some are dead links on the source; some are pages that never had a file. This group is at least partly fixable, and we work through it.
An author turning off redistribution is a completely reasonable thing to do. They want downloads to happen on their page, with their stats and their support thread. The problem is not the decision — it is that a catalogue which keeps showing the entry afterwards is quietly promising something it cannot deliver.
What it cost, measured
We could have argued about this. Instead we measured it. Every day we record, per group: how many mods, how many times they were opened, and how many complaints they generated. Complaints per 1,000 opens is the number that matters, because the groups are wildly different sizes.
| Date | Consent withdrawn | Normal, downloadable | Ratio |
|---|---|---|---|
| 31 July | 2.31 | 0.65 | 3.6× |
| 1 August | 1.34 | 0.53 | 2.5× |
| 2 August | 1.04 | 0.46 | 2.3× |
At the start of the measurement the undeliverable group generated complaints at more than three times the rate of the normal catalogue. That is the cost of showing someone a mod they cannot have: they assume it is broken, and they tell you so.
On 30 July we stopped surfacing that group in discovery — the front page, the new-mods feed, the recommendation rails. We did not delete the pages, and we did not block search: if you specifically look for one of these mods by name, you still find it, with the situation explained. What changed is that we no longer walk up to people and offer it.
The rate has been falling since. It is not zero and it will not go to zero, because a mod that cannot be downloaded will always annoy the person who wanted it. Our own verdict on whether the change worked is not due until the numbers settle across a full week — three days is a direction, not a result, and we would rather say that than round it up into a victory.
Why not just delete them
It is a fair question, and we chose not to for two reasons.
The first is that the decision can be reversed. Authors change their minds, and settings get toggled by accident. We re-check consent flags on a schedule; a mod that becomes distributable again comes straight back into discovery with its page, its history and its search ranking intact. Deleting the entry would throw all of that away to solve a problem that might last a week.
The second is that a search result saying "this exists, here is what it is, you will need to get it from the author" is genuinely more useful than no result at all. The failure we were fixing was not that these mods appear — it is that they appeared as though they were downloadable, mixed into feeds designed to make you tap.
What we mirror, and why that is the other half of the story
Where authors do allow redistribution, we take the opposite approach and keep our own copy: 24,472 Bedrock mods are mirrored on our storage. That is not about speed. It is because links rot. Source sites reorganise, files move, hosts go down, and a catalogue that only holds links slowly turns into a list of 404s.
Mirroring is also what lets us open the archive and check it before you ever download — which is a different article, but the two policies come from the same place. A catalogue's job is not to have the biggest number on the front page. It is to make the entries mean something when you tap them.