Recently, we have a user that is experiencing a strange issue when he is downloading files from a Hotfile account.

When he adds Hotfile links into his download manager, e.g. Flashget or IDM. All of his Hotfile downloads will end with .html. It looks like Flashget has downloaded the actual page source instead of the linked file.

From looking at his IE and Flashget settings, both were setup correctly. We have tried reinstalling Flashget, clearing the browser’s cache, and rebooting. The results were the same.

The Web doesn’t have much help either. The Flashget site did have a solution. Press Control-W. But, you will need to do this every time when you download a file.

The strange thing is that flashget is working fine with our other Hotfile accounts. So this leaves us to believe that there might be some settings on the Hotfile side. And it turned out, there was. Hotfile does have a setting once you login to enable direct download. With this setting enabled, the user was able to directly download the linked file instead of just the page source. Not sure if the user has unchecked this option himself because he signed up to it long time ago or Hotfile in the past have that setting as a default settings for new users.