Limiting member donwloads in paysite
 

Does anyone know of any easy way to limit member downloads in a paysite on a given day? (eg. 500mb/day?) Is there a script around that does this?

Your absolutely insane if you do this. Restrict download managers if you wish but do not restrict legit members from downloading what they want.

If you have 3 day trials or something and you want to put a cap on that, clearly state that on your terms and join pages so that they know going in they are being capped during their trial membership.

Treat the customer like he is the king.


- Brent Axford

I hope 500mb is just a random number and not what you plan on capping it at....

That's not a lot especially with high speed Internet these days...

I would say its a bad idea. Unless the limit is rather high.

He didn't ask for our opinions.

Anyone knows a solution?

Especially on 3 days trials . All thoses fucking programs that download the whole websites out kill the BW so fast . You set the limit high . Like 3 gigs a day . You are sure the surfer get everything he needs but if the account get submitted to password sites or leeched you don't loose all the bw for nothing

Pennywize will do this...

But anyone who hits a limit on a trial will get angry and not convert.

500 megs is really low. Maybe 5 gigs.

Bandwidth is damn cheap, I think it's a bad idea

I would cancel my membership as soon as I hit the limit.

I think that Lightspeed does this?

i belive mod_throttle for apache is able to throttle by bandwidth used based on IP and allows a timeframe to be set.

why pay for pennywise when you can use a free apache module.

ICQ me if you have any questions.

Bullshit...
All cool leachers can change user agent. How you can know leacher with user agent IE 6.0?

#

thats why they are download limits :)

Pennywise has that - for $29.99 a month I think this is much better than having a pass posted on a password site ... my :2 cents:

For 29.99 you also get the standard IP password protection, etc.

Seems like a good idea. Definitely would not recommend putting it at 500mb though as stated at the start of the thread.

If you can't afford members downloading a certain number of vid's, you shouldn't be in the biz. It's a cost of doing business

Script like PennyWize claim to limit what a user downloads,
but that's not exactly what they actually do.
Instead, all of the ones that I've seen limit the sum of the file
sizes for which they issue a request. What's the difference?
The difference is that if a user takes a look at the first 15 seconds
of a video, decides he doesn't want that one, and takes a peek
at another one, pennywize et al count it as though the user got
the whole video. This is a great way to piss off users.
"Sorry, bud, you can only peek at 5 videos a day because they're each 100 MB."

Mod_throttle can actually limit what they download,
but it's designed more to control how much they download
per minute than per day. On a busy site using it to track everyone's
usage for the last 24 hours may or may not work too well.

Normally when people ask this question what they are really
wanting to do is block slurpers (rippers).
That's a whole different question. The way to block
slurpers is NOT by limiting bandwidth, for several reasons.
Without going iinto too much detail, you can see that with the
pennywize style limiting you will end up blocking the legitimate
customer who peeks at a few videos while the slurper
is able to download several thousand images before he gets blocked.
Looking at user_agent isn't the way to go either.
That just blocks people who TELL you that they are slurping.
Especialy, having a list of disallowed user agents is
the wrong way to go. For why that's true, read chapter one
of any decent book on security.

If you want to block automated site spidering programs
(known as rippers or slurpers), they way to do that is by blocking
based on the fact that they are 1) automated and 2) spiders.
Block them immediately when they start spidering your site,
not after they download 2,000 images.
That's what Strongbox does - block them if they are ripping
your site, without any other BS.
Well, that and also protect from brute force attacks,
password sites, and all kinds of other nasties.

PS - Someone mentioned that on a 3 day trial if you block them
after 2GB they won't convert. News flash - if they bought a
trial membership and immediately began using a ripper to download
the whole site, they weren't going to convert anyway.
They don't need too - your site is on their hard drive.

Can't you just limit an account to 2 or 3 download threads open at a time?


:helpme

With my broadband connection i would be able to download 60gb in 3 days with 3 download threads.. i don't think that's the way to go too :)

Surfer pays $3.95 for a 3 day trial.
Surfer downloads the whole site in 4 hours.
Do you think he will recurr to a full membership? Don't think so.

I'd say limit the bandwidth for trial members. But full members should not have any bandwidth limits.
It should of course be fully visible for the surfer when they sign up. Just so they will not get suprised when they get locked out for downloading the whole site.

Yep Pennywise does a good job of restricting access via ip's per day, or bandwidth etc. Its a pretty good program and easy to learn and use.


- Brent Axford

good thread!

mod_bandwidth

I think the MaxConnection directive applies to a single IP. Not 100% sure though.


mod_throttle

Take a look at the Concurrent directive.

if i signed up and was restricted i would charge back

If you knew before hand that trials were limited. Why would you charge back?

mod_bandwidth and mod_throttle dont work very effectively.

But what you want done is doable.

I don't use trials so I don't have a cap... but if you offer 2.95$ you HAVE to cap it... leeching bastards!

mod_throttle works perfect for me on heavy traffic sites for myself and other people i do work for. mod_throttle combined with some code tweeks and/or additional scripting will yeild you a much better and customized solution than any pre-built general script out there.

i know nasty dollars and socal sites do it

and socalcash has kick ass conversions from trials to one month members, something like 70 percent of trial members rebill..
(unfortunately almost everyone stay only for one month in my case - i belive that a lot of people has better reccuring then me),

Pennywize is really slow on high bandwidth, because writed on perl.

2 topic starter: hit me at icq: 19336496, i can help you