Members area limits
 

Members area limits

as everyone is trying find the best balance between massive downloaders/regular members - share your experiences/limits here :-)

There are programs out there that can 'throttle' the members if you are having an issue or concerns about your site being raped.

I used to restrict my members area to 1.2 gigs per day, but occasionally I'd have a member come in... rip the whole members area... and get locked out for 24 hours. I'd get a nasty message from them saying "I paid for a membership, and I don't know what's going on... I'm locked out." I felt kinda bad about that, considering they actually are paying for the content.

So I took off the limitations. Also, we've been adding 1080p videos, and each one is over a gig... so I had to raise it either way. I was sick of fighting it...

I know, it has two sides - I do not want to limit paying customer, but some level of protection is needed.....

Iam thinking about something about 10-15 gigs / day, this should not limit even guys with fast connection, but can help to find abusers....

(yes, we are using password/trading protection of course :-) )

That is correct.

True, bandwidth is so expensive, it's much more sensible to give a paying customer a worse experience than a tube site to make sure he never joins another site again and just jerks off over tube sites that never limit his downloads.

do away with trials

The best limits vary by site because some sites have 12MB videos and others
have 1GB videos. Still others have tens of thousands of pics. 1GB of video might
be an appropriate limit on some sites. 1GB of pictures is about 10,0000 pictures -
obviously someone ripping your site. Also, for best results you'd use a couple of
different limits on one site, but let's skip that for a moment.

Leaving alone all of the reasons to NOT have 1GB videos, to find the best limits for
YOUR site, it's best to see what normal members do on your site. Take a look at this
example:

https://www.bettercgi.com/throttlebo...oosing_limits/

You'll notice the usage is a gentle slope down for everyone but that one
top user. That gentle slope, with each user using about the same as the
next one, shows normal usage. Then we have the one guy who used four
times as much as everyone else. That's the guy we want to control, so we
set the limit just a little higher than what the normal users used.

On a side note, "per day", which means "per 24 hours", is about the worst time period
you can use for a limit. When you get down to it, what your customers do with your
product is jack off. Normal usage, a jack off session, is maybe 30 minutes. One sign
of abuse is when they spend many hours downloading rather than the 30 minutes or so
a good jack requires, so putting a limit "per session", per couple of hours, might make
sense.

Many of them come to your site about the the same time each day - after work,
after their wife goes to work, whatever. So Joe Customer comes to your site after
work one day, spending from 5:43-6:13 on your site. The next day he comes in
after work, logging in at 5:35. Notice that's still in the same 24 hour period. Had he
sat down a few minutes later, it would have been a new 24 hour period. That's not
the most effective way to do it - having your limits randomly used or not depending on
precisely what time they log in each day. Since humans live on a daily cycle of "about
24 hours", looking at a 36 hour period or longer is much more effective. Looking at the
last 36 hours, you'd reliably count both evening sessions every time. Looking at a
three hour period, you'd reliably get only a single session, so you know what you're
counting. So there are good reasons to look at a short period, a single session, and
there are good reasons to look at a longer time frame of 36-72 hours. We analyze
both with our system. You can see our approach here:

https://www.bettercgi.com/throttlebo...s/ruleEdit.png

You'll also notice at the top of the screenshot those rules apply to images - .jpg and .jpeg files.
That's because as we mentioned earlier 1GB of pics is 100,000 pics, clear abuse.
1GB of video may be perfectly normal. So there is no one limit appropriate for both pics
and videos - they should each have an appropriate limit.

You'll also notice that in addition to a GB limit, the screenshot shows a limit on the
NUMBER of pics. Looking at how MANY pics or videos they got can be almost as
effective as looking at the GBs, and combining both approaches works a lot better
than either one by itself.

So you see for the best results you go a little beyond the simplistic "2GB a day".
That might sound a bit complex, but we geeks have made a simple point and click
way for you to do it, and you pretty much just have to do it once.

Any programs available that kills the abilty to play the movie after you've cancelled your membership to the site... more like you are renting the movies!