Wetlook World Forum

Message # 51649.2.2.1

Subject: Re:Download Managers!

Date: Fri 02/09/11 13:18:45 GMT

Name: soundguy

Email: cl@themothership.net

Website:

By Malvineous - mrnemesis@ntlworld.com Thu 01/09/11 16:11:59 GMT

Website:

The Mothership's whole system is riddled with bugs. I found a minor one where middle-click on certain links (open link in new tab in any modern browser) yields a 401/404 error where left click opens a popup correctly. Nothing serious, just a little rough edge that needs cleaning (I fix little rough edges in my own code all the time -- we all slip up). I reported this to Soundguy, so that he could change the href target to be the same address as the popup page. He responded with a typically belligerent e-mail; he has a foul attitude, and he won't fix any bugs, preferring to blame the visitor for actually expecting his website to work correctly. The bug was a very simple mistake like we all make, but damned if he's going to actually fix it -- he'd rather blame the user instead. The bug is there to this day -- I hit it again this week.

I don't know that he's intentionally crippling download managers, I think it really may just be a subtle bug, but he doesn't fix bugs. Erik wanted me to fix Soundguy's gallery bugs for him, which I'm perfectly capable of doing, but that really pissed him off. Erik had to completely replace Soundguy's gallery system as the default one at the Mothership was completely broken and unusable, and it would have remained broken forever -- again, Soundguy won't fix bugs. I think he even suggested that Erik was too insignificant to warrant his time making the product that Erik's paying for, do its job – his response was exceptionally cold. Instead, he chose to intimidate Erik and ensure that his broken rubbish remained intact. Fortunately Erik's perfectly capable of knocking up a servicable site that remains in use today.

Soundguy is a deeply unpleasant individual.

Also, you must remember that some of these downloads are big – I pulled down a 900 MB file from Vidown from Erik! If my broadband was a bit iffy, I'd have to download that over and over and over and over hoping that it might complete in a single pass, because I can't use a download manager to resume the download. (I won't go into the intricate details of HTTP resuming and byte ranges and the problems of download managers, but I believe you can trivially compromise to get working resume without permitting acceleration, and I've already had this working at WetInRed and I still have all the code. If Soundguy cared, we could have a very productive discussion about this.)

Cheers

Mal.

By leonmoomin - leonmoomin@ntlworld.com Wed 31/08/11 06:54:14 GMT

Website:

Thing to remember here is that Themothership does not support Download Managers.

Download managers can be a massive drain on bandwidth, the odd user, using it here and there, such as on my sites, which were built by messmaster, is not a big problem, but if all of Themothership's customers used them, they would be a big problem.  Not to mention people using stolen cards to rip an entire site of its contents, before the stolen card's memberships gets killed.

Also, when we receive a chargeback, we don't just get charged the money you spent, we also have to take a further charge of $100.  So it costs us the price paid and $100 everytime we receive a chargeback.  We can't really despute the chargebacks, we have to take them on the chin.  So in the cases of chargebacks, people will be banned.

Most situations can be resolved by e-mailing us and trying to sort it out by way of refund, a chargeback kills that opportunity.

Soundguy, may be brief and to the point, but, he always answers e-mails very promptly, which is a very good service these days, even if you may not like what he has to say.

leonmoomin

By Malvineous - mrnemesis@ntlworld.com Sat 27/08/11 14:48:55 GMT

Website:

When you put in a large order with someone like Erik Elsas, it would be very useful to be able to queue up all the files and leave it running as there's hours of downloading to get through. I don't use DownThemAll! for acceleration – in fact I successfully campaigned for better support for intelligent unaccelerated downloading. I just want a queue facility, so I can leave all the downloads going without having to sit at my PC for hours nannying it. I had a much larger set of files to download from Mostwam, but they use a different system ad the queue completed flawlessly while I spent most of the day away from my PC.

I reported this bug ages ago to Erik who passed it on to Patrick at the Mothership, who refuses to look at the problem. I don't imagine there's any way to persuade him to actually fix this?

(I doubt he'd let me add resuming support to his code, either.)