UPDATE: New Statement on Modding Rules

I think the requirement to not hide all content forever protects both modders and players: in the days of TS1 and TS2, when servers like gamespy shut down, the modders lost all content they had no backups of, and their sites shut down with them. Also, people would pay just long enough to grab everything and share it with a few friends. Or servers would impose other restrictions or certain pmt types would just quit working. Still, Patreon and The Sims Resource are way safer than ad.fly or short.est and I actively avoid cc or modders who use ad redirection services because their ads are NOT safe, even for five seconds. And if they freeze your browser or system they cannot even be reported back to the service. If the ad restricted service goes down, you now have a huge number of broken links on your site. If your hosting service goes away and you made people pay money to use your content, and claimed that the people resharing the content were breaking the law, all your mods go away anyhow. I have shared a lot of content I did not make from sites that closed before I shared them. This rule now by EA makes it clear that no cc creator or modder has exclusive rights to their content in perpetuity. By definition, if the site was closed, the modder or creator already retired. Grim Sims was one of the sites I shared after they closed. MATY started out as a custom content “thief” site, for both TS1 and TS2. There were numerous Yahoo groups and email lists as well.