I am leaning toward as the best source, but am interested in the opinions of and any other forum members. However, I found that the archived copies of the downloads themselves work fine:
The main problem with this is there is something about the wch.cn website that makes the download links from the archived driver page not work: This provides access to the latest version of the driver (3.5). The second is the archived copy of the manufacturer's website on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, trustworthy both because it's provided by Internet Archive and because it's a copy of the manufacturer's own website. Plug-and-Play (hot-pluggable) USB 1.1 and 2.
USB 2.0 SERIAL DRIVER WIN 7 DRIVERS
The latest version from the manufacturer is 3.5, with a date, as compared to the date specified for the SparkFun 3.4 download. The FTDI software drivers are included in the package. The only problem is they are providing the outdated 3.4 version of the Windows driver (I didn't check to see what the situation is for the Linux and macOS driver versions). SparkFun is definitely a trustworthy source, and that is a nice tutorial as well. The first is SparkFun's tutorial dedicated to the CH340: Since that's no longer possible, I have two alternative sources I'm considering: This is why I have always recommended people to go straight to the manufacturer's website to get the CH340 driver. I think it's important to get drivers from a trustworthy source. I was hoping it would come back, but now it's looking like that's not going to happen. I have observed this problem of the website of the CH340, wch.cn, being down some months ago. BTW the CH340 link under the thread that is at the beginning, does not work.