Hollow 'Download' Registrations

Might you be talking about the Smartphone & Pocket PC Magazine site, Rich? I remember you had lots of posts over there before the site faded into the sunset. I think it was about that time you became a mod over here.

I think that you should decide whether you want to cause activity or to host files for old users.
Inducing activity is impossible this way.
Limiting downloads for old users would work this way of course.

My clue is that you should pass your network costs directly onto the one-time downloaders, per-megabyte instead of per-file, so that anybody can still download and only pay few cents. Is there an effective way of doing so?

You could also host files for recurring users and make P2P for anybody else. Some of us could seed at moderate speeds.

Edited by Alt Bass 2019-01-18 9:33 AM

Might have been Gregg. I think you're correct.

What you should do C:Amie is create a gibberish 20Tb file and have the leechers download it.

The difficulty with pay per MB is in failed downloads and how you mitigate against monetisation of faults - either client side or server side. It's technically possible for me to byte count, but it's a real problem for payments and fairness. Especially for dispute purposes.

I am trying to find a mechanism whereby this site costs me personally less to run. It has already been scaled down and rationalised, which leaves it generating more contribution income as the only real way to proceed now. I've funded this site, almost single handedly for 20 years. The server hardware is end of life, Windows Server isn't free and with things like the GDPR which have required massive amounts of my time to get us compliant to in the last 18 months I'm required even more to keep things ship-shape than I was before.

My second motive is to put an end to the insufferable spate of people donating £0.01 because they think they'll be able to trick the system into letting them 'have at' the server. These sad, lonely people are highly inclined to actually make a complaint about the fact that they didn't receive something for their penny. PayPal then charge me for their corrupt mentality.

The donation average has declined to £4-£5/mo. March 2018 it was £1.02 in total. PayPal then take their % and like us all, I have to make tax contribution too.

Of course so many of you have and remain very generous, and I thank everyone for that and for the better months where our wonderful regulars shine through with contributions. Leachers just seem to be next on the list. I'd worry that doing it would put people off joining... just we're not actually growing anyway. 17.3k deleted "same day drive-by" registrations proves that.

hmm. I added a tick box to the registration form which gets people to confirm "I understand that by registering I will NOT have automatic access to file downloads from this site" and re-opened registration again on Sunday.

No one has registered at all since

Could it have been that simple?

Well, it's only been two days.

Zero registrations in 48 hours? It has never happened before!

Probably because the registration process is borked, I've tried several times to register and everytime I hit continue after
entering my details I get a webpage error.

Works fine for me?

Indeed, 'borked registration' I agree on that. There is something weird that will not go away.

My password stopped working some 12 months ago and I have not been able to log in , even after I got a new password around september 2018....

I will now just try with a new registration, and probably be automatically flagged as a 'drive by' user.....

E-mail the webmaster address and I'll reset you. Also details on the error message would help please.

Also mancity created an account 20 minutes after posting that it didn't work, so it can't be that broken.

You purged michelbel, C:Amie?

Before I even enter anything I get an error message on the initial verification screen.





Attachments
----------------
Screenshot_2019-01-27-20-43-50.png (316KB - 0 downloads)

And after registering using an alternate email address, I obtained the link from the hpcfactor email, copied it into my browser and then got this response below.

So I tried to login despite the errir nessage and was able to login fine as a new user a couple minutes later.





Attachments
----------------
Screenshot_2019-01-27-21-02-18.png (245KB - 0 downloads)