Ensorceled's page

Not to pick on you in particular, but this seems to be a common approach and I don't understand it.

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

I'm always amazed when people can't figure out why other people don't do things the exact same way they do ...

The last few humble bundles I've bought I done EXACTLY this. Download all the eBooks and put them in my iBooks, download all the D&D comics and put them in iBooks, download ...

Why would I login/download/logout dozens of times as I read these things one by one? Why would I count on these being available for download in a year or two or ten when I finally get around to it?

Anguish wrote:

A 100x expected peak demand isn't something any IT group scales for. We'd never get the budget for that kind of overkill. It'd be like a grocery store having 700 cash registers, just in case.

Nice analogy.

It's actually a poor analogy. In a Grocery store you line up behind the 5 cash registers (and out the door) and eventually get served. In this model the 5 cashier try to process 500 purchases at once, if they can't finish THEM ALL in a few minutes, they throw all the groceries out and kick the customers out of the store and try again.

If the IT team had made a real work queue with something like rabbitMQ or Amazon SQS you would only make one request (and could only make one request) and then just log in later and download your download.

In fairness, this site is built in WebObjects which is pretty old tech, they may not have the ability to do a real queuing system without a LOT of work.

The problem is that you need to stay on the site and can not just leave it and come back later when it is finished.

Yeah, I just discovered that myself. If you don't check on a regular basis you get logged out. So much for trying to be patient, I've lost my place in the queue :-/

A second suggestion to Paizo: ... increase your session timeouts (why are they so short in the first place?!?) so people can get their stuff later. Currently you are actually rewarding your users for DDOSing your site and punishing them for following your directions.

If you really don't want us to click multiple times on the download link, may I humbly suggest that a developer change the text from "Personalizing ... Click link again in 10 seconds to download" to "Personalizing... check back here again in <however long the queue is taking in minutes/hours/days>"

As a web developer myself, I can tell you that people are not going to read the red text at the top of the page but they WILL read the text that says "click here in 10 seconds to get your goodies" and then they'll dutifully punch it every 10 seconds until they get bored and then maybe read the red text.