More Bandwidth and Revenue Needed

[derobert]

Of the 38074 local videos, 36538 were downloaded at least once last month. This is 95.97% of all local videos getting downloaded last month.

That number is interesting, but irrelevant... The real question, is what portion of the videos are downloaded by multiple people simultaneously?

[derobert]

But when it comes to CCs, Derobert's method of coding is much better.

Yeah, I really should get to that....

[derobert]

BTW - I'd give $5 to get that 'Wants extra stuff by name' changed to my preferred tag of 'Oyaji in training'.

$15 to pick a new user name.

Hmmmm......

[derobert]

Make the donation total accumumlative - entirely accumulative. Those fancy titles for donators mean nothing if the donation is cleared after a year, leaving the donator to start from zero again.

FYI, I think 'Pillar' works like that. Once your lifetime contributions total $1200.

The extra donator perks you mention sound interesting. Hopefully, with a dev environment, there is actually a chance of someone implementing them....

[DarkNinja75]

I believe bandwidth caps would be the most viable option, with 20 kb/sec being the perfect limit. Personally, if I had downloads going that slow I'd find it intolerable. I have cable with the objective of clicking a download and getting the file NOW. If I'm forced to wait, I'm going to do anything in my power to change that. Donating $5 or some other random amount would be a small price for the sake of convenience.

Personally, my main reason for not downloading is the lack of means to get the money to its destination. I am only a high school student and that prohibits me from having a credit card, a checking account, and/or a Paypal account. All I really have is cash, and I'm not quite naive enough to send that through the mail. I realize that money orders are also an option, but the money spent for the money order would be subtracted from my total donation amount. I know there isn't much you can do about these problems; I'm simply letting it be known why I, and possibly others, haven't donated.
But the message on the main page is certainly a good method to encourage donators. I'm to the point where I don't even notice the "pledge proceed pledge" page when I go to download a video. I am one of those "it's not my problem" people as well. I occassionally looked at the donation stats compared to the needed funds, and the available funds always seemed to exceed the need. But with the impending doom of the Org on the line, my plan is to simply borrow a relative's credit card and pay them back in cash. That seems to be the best method for me to ensure security.

Honestly, incentives wouldn't work for me; bandwidth caps are the only thing. I come to the Org to download AMV's and occassionally post a journal entry, and that's it. If I have to pay to keep AMV's centralized, then I'm willing to give some extra money I may find myself with.

[Corran]

I think a good idea would be to place a bandwidth cap on non-donators accounts to like 20kb/sec or something.

I'm not sure how, technically, we'd pull that off....

Does this help? I'm not sure if this is a viable solution or not.

Simple script to limit browser download speed using fread function.

Code: Select all

<?php

$file = "test.mp3"; // file to be send to the client
$speed = 8.5; // 8,5 kb/s download rate limit

if(file_exists($file) && is_file($file)) {

   header("Cache-control: private");
   header("Content-Type: application/octet-stream");
   header("Content-Length: ".filesize($file));
   header("Content-Disposition: filename=$file" . "%20");

   flush();

   $fd = fopen($file, "r");
   while(!feof($fd)) {
         echo fread($fd, round($speed*1024));
       flush();
       sleep(1);
   }
   fclose ($fd);

}

?>

[Tono_Fyr]

Err... this may seem kinda stupid, but I wouldn't mind seeing google ads at the bottoms of pages, or ads for various anime store sites, as long as there are no pop ups or spyware involved. I know that Online comic artists can LIVE off of the revenue they get off of ads, so why can't the org sustain a higher bandwidth?

I really don't want to be stuck getting vids at 1/10th the speed I was formerly getting them. It would take forever, and remind me far too much of my not-so-distant dial up days. I'm for a 100 KiloBytes per second cap, because that would still allow for the ability to get videos quickly, while being fair to those (such as myself) who have no real way to donate. I'd LOVE to donate, but I have no credit card, and, if I did, my mother wouldn't allow me to use it to donate to a site that is (and I REALLY hate to say this) more or less a piracy site. Being in high school sucks -.- I'm more than willing to donate, I just lack the ability.

I have several friends who *hate* this place, because they have any number of problems with getting videos. I really don't want to listen to them bitch about it more than they already do.

I want to say something else, but it's late, and my mind isn't working well enough to quantitate the rest of it. My 2 cents, I guess.

[Corran]

I really don't want to be stuck getting vids at 1/10th the speed I was formerly getting them.

That is kind of the point. Reducing download speed won't make non-donators who are used to the current speed happy though it should encourage them to donate.

As for your situation you could probably obtain a money order from you local post office or something if you really have no other means. Credit cards, sending cash through the mail, and bank accounts aren't the only way.

[Chap]

I think bandwith caps are a perfect way of handling this matter for 2 reasons. One it will hopefully inspire more people to want to pay, and secondly if people aren't paying then your bandwith goes down because they can only suck up so much at one time so you shouldn't need to upgrade the sites bandwith anytime soon. You can also adjust the bandwith cap as needed so that if today you make it 40kbs and thats starts being to much you can drop it to 30, and then to 20 and so on.

[turboneko]

Hey Phade,
the whole utopia stuff was very nice at the beginning, but at that time the site was much smaller and we mostly knew each other one by one (and, again mostly, we could trust each other).

The site has grown a lot since then and, by the law of big numbers, it averaged on what's the average of the internet: a mass of selfish biatches who do not want to pay a single cent for a service because "it's on the internet and has to be free".

I can understand the difficulites of people in high school, people without credit card and foreign people... but don't give me the "it would cost more to send the money that the donation itself" shit please. All we need is $1 from everybody. Most of the people should be able to spare more than that. So what if it costs $10 to send that single dollar out... you are doing what you are supposed to do: an act of love for something that you like and want to support.

Now, the serious business. I like a lot of the things that SaraTheBoring proposed: cut the max filesize for non-donators to 40mb (hell, go read the guides and learn how to compress your stuff), put a cap on the download speed and increase visibility of donators. However, I still think that we should act more drastically and limit the ability to upload to donators only: people would literally kill for getting their vids out there, and I believe that this is the nail we should hammer.

I know, it is not the utopia that we dreamed of, but we have to live in the real world. Hosting IS a service and to me it's more than justified to be paying for it (and we are talking a mere $1/y here).

Will this cause civil wars and endless complains? Yes. Should we care about them? That's the question that we need to answer.

- Marco out