This morning I got a notification from haveibeenpwned.com that my credentials at dafont.com have been exposed due to a data breach. Zdnet has
the story. If you have a dafont account, please change your password, and if you use that password on other sites too... don't do that.
Comments
"We are currently working to fix some vulnerabilities. Meanwhile, modifications to your profile are disabled to limit malicious access to user accounts.
Everything should be back in a few days, and then you'll be asked to change your password. We apologize for any inconvenience.
That's if you take security seriously, of course. If you don't understand security, just keep the site running but don't allow affected users to change their compromised passwords...
I think Dafont's popularity has been steady or increasing. I get about 20,000 downloads a day. If I average the number of daily downloads over the last 12 years, it's 13,256. And my fonts are much lower on the charts than they used to be. But I think you're right about web ads.
The number of legitimate (not deliberately pirate) free font sites has decreased. In 2011, I received a C&D and was required to contact every free font site and ask them to remove a certain font. It took a solid 3 weeks. There were hundreds of them. Many of these were a "free font site in a box" that was being sold on eBay based on a mangled site rip of 1001freefonts.com. People who run free fonts sites are often very elusive. So many free fonts sites have broken contact forms or no contact information at all. Folks, be extra careful about trademarks in your font names because cleaning up the mess is no fun.
In 2014, I received another C&D and had to do the same thing all over again. This time it took less than a week to have the font removed from every free font site. I think over a hundred of them had vanished and new ones hadn't popped up to replace them. I suspect those clone sites earned their owners zero dollars.
The number of free font sites who take the latest dafont releases and post them on their own sites has dwindled to around a dozen. Not that long ago, a new Dafont release would spider out to over 50 sites now it's consistently less than 10 sites for the last 3 years.