Athra's page

Hi again everyone,

* Thanks, and kudos, to Paizo staff who got the watermarking system working again. I went through almost everything in about a week as opposed to a year. ;) (It's not a fast process by any means, but it chugs along nicely, which is good enough for me in this case.)

* I have a general question, valid for such busy times as well as regular times: What's Paizo's take on wget (or equivalents), scripted to try again every X minutes until a download starts, and try again if a download fails?

Hey, whatever you folks did during the maintenance/upgrade, it seems to be working. (Or, it's so soon after the "down for maintenance" period that nobody's trying to download anything but me. But hey, it still works. ;) )

The download itself is still very slow (~150 mins for 115 MB) but it starts quickly enough, so the watermarking's being done much faster, I guess.

So... Thanks! :)

Staff have already asked that this subject be dropped. This is not the time, nor place. This is also not the only online store to watermark PDFs.

My comment pertains more to a possibility of speeding up the process rather than whether watermarked PDFs should exist or not. I'm assuming that they should exist is a given.

1)Would you be okay with owning "non/generic" watermarked copies that were not legal for official games?

OK, how about:

* Give us the option to download non-watermarked copies now. You can still get watermarked copies if you wish.
* Somehow make sure the downloader understands they are illegal in organized play.
* Remove this option of non-watermarked copies in a few weeks.

That would be something worth considering, no?

Things are looking up. I was able to get two downloads going. They will take ~40 mins to complete. (Using Firefox 44.0.2 on Xubuntu 15.10, did not need to play with timeout values as that was not the hangup for me.)

Oh, and the "10 seconds" takes much closer to 10 seconds now. Of course, on mainland US, it's anywhere between 6 to 9 AM right now, so that may be the reason.

Things are looking up. I was able to get two downloads going. They will take ~40 mins to complete. (Using Firefox 44.0.2 on Xubuntu 15.10, did not need to play with timeout values as that was not the hangup for me.)

SteelValor wrote:

At my current rate of download it will take me a year, YES A YEAR, to finish retrieving my 117 files. I have 1 of 117 and this is day three.

Why would you want to download all 117 files right now?

I'm in the same situation, so here goes:

* Why? Well, why not? Whether it was cheap or not, I paid for it. It was advertised as I was paying that I could download them in any way I like, so I want to download them all. I keep a library of my own if you want to know, but that's beside the point: I don't need to explain why. If Paizo can't handle this, they should humbly (:p) apologize and explain (which they are doing nicely, so kudos there). They should also fix this, it's their job (well, no kudos yet ;) ).

* Whether you download one file now and the rest later, or whether you download them all right now, the total bandwidth used for serving the PDF's and the processor power to watermark the PDFs is the same. Paizo needs to find a way to securely serve these PDFs in a timely manner.

* A simple back of the envelope calculation indicates Paizo having a backlog of downloads of not seconds, not minutes (which is barely acceptable in this day and age), not days, but YEARS with their current system. I may be lucky to be served before, but someone else will still wait for it. Unless something big is done soon.

* I click on a download a few times a day, and I don't even get the "Personalizing" message any more--just a scroll down of the page until what I clicked on is at the top of the page.

* I personally don't mind waiting for a week or three and then downloading everything all at once. I DO mind this trickling speed of downloads which would take me a year to get everything.

* After 3.5 went on to 4.0 and my beloved Living Greyhawk was scrapped, Pathfinder kept things alive. Even though I had to stop playing for personal reasons around the same time, I am very grateful for that. I don't think I'll find the time to play properly anytime soon, but still I'm glad to have paid them what I paid, even though I probably won't use them much. If I were to use these PDFs a lot, this would have been a great bargain. But for me , this is just a way of saying thanks. But I'd still like to get the PDFs in a reasonable time, just to complete my library. ;)

(Edit: Spelling, and removed the speed requirement math. I should not speak of things I know little about.)