Nearly every site uses zip compression when it comes to offering roms...yet 7zip has a better compression ratio, much better. Smaller sizes can save up bandwidth and... well, more stuff I'm not thinking about atm. So, why not implement it?
Actually no. We do not use 7zip because it is a lot less widespread than .rar and we get loads of people who can't figure out how to open .rar files. Switching to 7zip would make that problem many times worse.
If I was going along the lines of 'x owns' I'd be saying '7zip owns' because I hardly ever us .rar these days.
I see... so there isn't big enough benefit to convince you to switch? Couldn't it be fixed by adding a little message to the bottom of a every page "To open 7z archives you will need the latest winrar or 7zip. go here"... Just like many torrent sites point to torrent clients, I guess it'd be more or less the same. It'd be something different if people started asking what to do with "those weird nds files".... :
They only link to those torrent clients because they're paid to do so. If you go to a torrent site chances are you know how to use a .torrent file, the same cannot be said for .7z or even .rar files, .zip files are usually known but even those require support sometimes. We've always used .rar, several years ago when it wasn't very widespread too, we had to do loads of support because people could figure it out, we wrote about it in the FAQ, on the forum, in the news etc. yet we still got it constantly. .7z is in much the same position today, yes you can save maybe 10% over .rar compression but it's just not worth the extra effort it would require on our part, we already volunteer way too much time to this project.
I'm still surprised when people these days don't understand compression. I remember when i first came across a 7zip I was like wtf? wtf is this and how do I open it? then i did a search on the extension and there was my answer. with the word 'google' being so intergrated into our language, its a wonder how people still cannot find these simple answers for themselves.
Common sense among people is sadly more rare than winning the lottery twice in a row and with the same numbers.
And going on road accident statistics, you're more likely to die on the way to buy a lottery ticket than you are to win with said ticket.
