Safeguard for Member file downloads

ID:134461
 
Jul 13 2006, 12:43 pm
I don't think this is probably a very feasible request, but if there were some way to prevent people from sabotaging other users BYOND Member bandwidth from mass downloading files, it might be something to look into.

I say this because Silkwizard's "Silkgames" account had a copy of Dragon Warrior Online up for download on his site (linked to in the HUB) and was downloaded nearly 8000 times in the course of a few days, thus exceeding his bandwidth by nearly 200 megs.

I'm not tech savvy enough to know if there's anything that could be done to prevent things like that from happening, but just throwing it out there that it could be a potential problem. It's not a problem for us to put the game up for download somewhere else or anything, but it is a little bit distressing to see what looks to be either an inadvertant or planned sabotage of his member account.
Jul 13 2006, 1:40 pm
This is a legitimate problem and I'd love to come up with a reasonable solution. We can look at ways of trying to detect when the same client downloads a file over and over again. In fact, that's what happened here - a single user accounted for over 7600 requests over the course of about 25 minutes.

Our web logs suggest this person was using the Free Download Manager program to send those 7600 requests. My guess is that the program tried to download the file in chunks, but was too buggy to handle the way our server provides those files. So it went haywire and continued trying until all bandwidth was used up. If this is the case, I'm a little irritated that such crap software exists and can throttle our server at a moment's notice.

The alternative, of course, is that it was a malicious attack designed to throttle the bandwidth.

Regardless of that, I've gone ahead and bumped bandwidth back up on the Silk Games account.
Jul 13 2006, 9:03 pm
Members should have the ability of choosing how much bandwidth they wish to spend on files on a file-per-file basis, so it doesn't all get gurgled up. Same thing with file downloading and such.
While you're at it, if it isn't already there, make a chmod-like permissions-based system for Members which will allow them to specify whom is allowed to obtain files. This could perhaps be Guild-based, so that only certain Guild ranks may download a specific file. The other settings would be "Members only" (as in, BYOND Members only) and "Everyone".