Customer Service Manager
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I am really cheesed off about this. Today is the second order I ever made with Paizo, the first was screwed up and I never got a satisfactory answer after several emails. Today, I go on and make a purchase for an instant download and only AFTER I have paid do I find out the download is unavailable. I made a phone call and an email, the phone call got the run around, the email got no response. I am VERY unhappy
After our phone conversation, I was able to take your feedback regarding a warning message to the tech team and we were able to get a notice up on the checkout page to warn future purchasers that the downloads are currently unavailable. As I said on the phone, I'm very sorry the My Downloads page isn't working at the moment. Our tech team is working as quickly as possible to get it back up and running. If you need a refund for the PDF so you can purchase it elsewhere, please let me know.
As for your previous order, the last communication we had was Cosmo explaining the shipping transit estimates and why our shipping costs are the way they are. Since we received no further communication from you at that time, we assumed your package had arrived. We still have that book in stock and if you never received your book please let me know so we can make sure you get it.
With regard to your email, customer service is working as quickly as possible to answer emails. We address them in the order they are received and unfortunately at the moment we have a number in the queue already.
thanks
sara marie
the best way to stop people from pirating stuff is to offer a better product/service than the pirates. if you price your stuff reasonably and make the process easy, most people won't pirate. the harder you make it on the paying customer, the more likely they will take their money else where.<soapbox>
Umm ... just a few inaccuracies with these sentences. First, those "offering" pirated material are "offering" the same material that you are buying here. Second, as to the price, with torrents, you are paying nothing, so there is no competition possible on the price front either. Third, MOST PEOPLE DON'T PIRATE ANYWAYS! Why? Because doing so is (1) illegal and (2) a really freaking a$$%@!* move, especially if you actually like the product you are downloading or uploading.
</soapbox>As to the server issues, good luck Gary and crew. As much as I would love to download book 1 of the new AP, I have no issues kicking back and waiting for the server to come back up. Better to have it done and done properly than rushed and go through it again in a short time.
They do thru a paypal CC.
I think that people who have ordered something have the right to be disappointed that they are not getting what they bought. I would think that as a company that seems to sell lots of .pdfs as well as has a great web presence that there would be some sort of backup to try to keep this type of thing from ever happening again.
PostMonster General
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We do actually have backups and some redundancy in place for the downloads server. It's just that multiple layers of redundancy failed simultaneously so we're rebuilding some hardware and software from scratch and backups and whatnot. We will be investigating additional redundancy in the future but for now we're focused on getting it back where it was before it went down.
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They do thru a paypal CC.the best way to stop people from pirating stuff is to offer a better product/service than the pirates. if you price your stuff reasonably and make the process easy, most people won't pirate. the harder you make it on the paying customer, the more likely they will take their money else where.<soapbox>
Umm ... just a few inaccuracies with these sentences. First, those "offering" pirated material are "offering" the same material that you are buying here. Second, as to the price, with torrents, you are paying nothing, so there is no competition possible on the price front either. Third, MOST PEOPLE DON'T PIRATE ANYWAYS! Why? Because doing so is (1) illegal and (2) a really freaking a$$%@!* move, especially if you actually like the product you are downloading or uploading.
</soapbox>As to the server issues, good luck Gary and crew. As much as I would love to download book 1 of the new AP, I have no issues kicking back and waiting for the server to come back up. Better to have it done and done properly than rushed and go through it again in a short time.
I am assuming you are replying to Marc's comment and not making a claim of connection between paypal CCs and digital piracy. ;)
I think that people who have ordered something have the right to be disappointed that they are not getting what they bought.
Of course. I think people here are just trying to explain that a) the personalizer is in place for a reason (to combat piracy) and b) this is a highly unusual situation (the downloader being down). If this happened often or even occasionally, I could understand the frustration. As it is, this is a rather unique incident and my suggestion is that people be patient. We will get our PDFs soon enough.
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I think that people who have ordered something have the right to be disappointed that they are not getting what they bought. I would think that as a company that seems to sell lots of .pdfs as well as has a great web presence that there would be some sort of backup to try to keep this type of thing from ever happening again.
Inconvenienced, definitely. Disappointed, yes. Mildly annoyed, maybe. But there's some "torches and pitchforks" language going on up in here and that's uncalled for given the information that Paizo has released. The server's been down unexpectedly less than 24 hours (less that 12?) and they have a solution to get it back up in a matter of hours. There's no indication that anyone won't get their stuff; their stuff is just delayed, like weather sometimes delays shipments.
-Skeld
On the subject of delays, as a project for later (obviously not today, when the tech team is busy putting out fires) would it be possible to tweak the interface so as to check a number of different files for personalization and downloading at once? This would be especially useful, for example, when you've got a new laptop and are trying to update all your PDFs on it. Also it would be useful as housekeeping so you're not caught without a needed PDF later when there's a server error, an internet outage, or assorted other troubles.
A "check and download all my new purchases" button would also be useful rather than manually clicking to personalize each one.
There's like 30 posts about PDF security and piracy and you only delete mine?
Thanks to all the tech team for keeping us up to date and working hard to get things rolling again. Just another reason I keep coming back to Paizo. :D
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I am 100% with Garreth. The paizo team is bloody awesome, and sometimes issues happen. It's life.
I was trying to download a PDF when the server went down yesterday... I have checked back nearly every hour since then... I am very anxious to get some sweet PDFs... But I really think its not the end of the world! and they will be the same PDFs whether I get them now or later.
The paizo staff is working pretty hard, they are giving us updates an are being pretty damn honest about the situation.
Thanks for working to solve the issues guys!
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We do actually have backups and some redundancy in place for the downloads server. It's just that multiple layers of redundancy failed simultaneously so we're rebuilding some hardware and software from scratch and backups and whatnot. We will be investigating additional redundancy in the future but for now we're focused on getting it back where it was before it went down.
Good luck with that, and I hope you've determined what caused it. Did you change the order of when people get to download? The wording of my shipping message made it seem like you opened up downloading to everyone who's ordered this time, instead of the downloadable as we pack each package system I understood the usual practice to be. So from that reading of the email, I assumed last night that the server was just slashdotted instead of having some kind of failure. Once things are working again, how will download availability work?
If you are having trouble with downloads, could be a browser or browser setting issue. Never hurts to check.If you experience issues with downloading from paizo.com that appears to only occur using a specific browser or device, please let us know. :)
Is this affecting order fulfillment as well? Normally I would have received my notice by now.
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PostMonster General
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We didn't change anything recently. This problem is the result of multiple simultaneous hardware failures. This outage should not affect order fulfillment—any orders that would create PDF assets on your account will be handled normally. This problem only affects your ability to download those assets.
The rebuilt downloads server is undergoing final testing so the situation is looking up.
I am 100% with Garreth. The paizo team is bloody awesome, and sometimes issues happen. It's life.
I was trying to download a PDF when the server went down yesterday... I have checked back nearly every hour since then... I am very anxious to get some sweet PDFs... But I really think its not the end of the world! and they will be the same PDFs whether I get them now or later.The paizo staff is working pretty hard, they are giving us updates an are being pretty damn honest about the situation.
Thanks for working to solve the issues guys!
Excellent. I think we've found someone to blame..
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Excellent. I think we've found someone to blame..I am 100% with Garreth. The paizo team is bloody awesome, and sometimes issues happen. It's life.
I was trying to download a PDF when the server went down yesterday... I have checked back nearly every hour since then... I am very anxious to get some sweet PDFs... But I really think its not the end of the world! and they will be the same PDFs whether I get them now or later.The paizo staff is working pretty hard, they are giving us updates an are being pretty damn honest about the situation.
Thanks for working to solve the issues guys!
Just what I was thinking.....
Oh, OK. I must just be early in the cycle this month.
My cycle must be running late this month. Wait...that doesn't sound right.
Just what I was thinking.....Excellent. I think we've found someone to blame..I am 100% with Garreth. The paizo team is bloody awesome, and sometimes issues happen. It's life.
I was trying to download a PDF when the server went down yesterday... I have checked back nearly every hour since then... I am very anxious to get some sweet PDFs... But I really think its not the end of the world! and they will be the same PDFs whether I get them now or later.The paizo staff is working pretty hard, they are giving us updates an are being pretty damn honest about the situation.
Thanks for working to solve the issues guys!
Run! They're coming to get you!
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This is certainly true. The average person is unable to remove the watermark. However, it just takes one skilled pirate and then the illegal version is out there in the wild.Shalafi, it puts your name or id on the pdfs as a watermark to discourage uploading it to a torrent.Doesn't work.....Jerks still do it.If it's dissuaded some from sharing their material illegally, then yes, it works. It won't keep everyone from illegal activity, sadly, but putting the watermark on the PDFs definitely will prevent some less tech-savvy people from sharing.
I'd rather deal with the water mark than a PDF that can only be read on one computer ONLINE or have paizo withdraw from the market like Wizards. I lost about 300 in books because I was on deployment and one friend lost access to every Wizards/TSR PDF legally available at the time. He had them all but lost them due to a vindictive wife and damaged back up drive. Paizo has been remarkably helpful to me over the years so I wait for a return to their usual excellent service.
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Chief Technical Officer
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Sorry I haven't posted prior to this; I was kind of busy today.
I'd just like to clarify that the delay in getting things back up is not driven by our desire PDF security (though I make no apology for that desire; it's very important to our business). While it's true that the personalizer—the application that watermarks PDFs—is down, so is the step before and the step after that, which is to say that even if we didn't watermark anything, we still wouldn't be serving PDFs right now.
This situation should end soon, though—Gary is about to make a delivery to our colocation facility; we'll have some testing to do once things are in place, so I can't give you a specific timeline right now.
I've already done some things to ensure that if the same unlikely circumstance happens again, we'll be able to recover from it a lot faster, and in the coming days, I'll be working to make sure that the unlikely circumstance is made even more unlikely.
No worries, computers are finiky beasts.
Glad you guys actually let everyone know what was going on. Plenty of companies would just stick up a message saying things are down and you wouldn't hear a word out of them beyond that.
No biggie, it's not like anyone is not getting something they've paid for. We just have to wait a bit longer than usual.
Sorry I haven't posted prior to this; I was kind of busy today.
I'd just like to clarify that the delay in getting things back up is not driven by our desire PDF security (though I make no apology for that desire; it's very important to our business). While it's true that the personalizer—the application that watermarks PDFs—is down, so is the step before and the step after that, which is to say that even if we didn't watermark anything, we still wouldn't be serving PDFs right now.
This situation should end soon, though—Gary is about to make a delivery to our colocation facility; we'll have some testing to do once things are in place, so I can't give you a specific timeline right now.
I've already done some things to ensure that if the same unlikely circumstance happens again, we'll be able to recover from it a lot faster, and in the coming days, I'll be working to make sure that the unlikely circumstance is made even more unlikely.
Wow, sounds like one heckuva bug. Hope things go okay, and thank you for working so tirelessly to get this fixed. I can be patient and wait so you can take more of my money. :)
EDIT: Though I would like to ask that next time the warnings come with a bright red background with bold white letters. I didn't see the warning until just now.
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Chief Technical Officer
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Though I would like to ask that next time the warnings come with a bright red background with bold white letters. I didn't see the warning until just now.
Like this?
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Hey ya Paizo!
I also ordered $40+ worth of various PDF downloads last night, and was gonna read up on some monster-ish stuff for an upcoming campaign. Surprise, the downloads site was down. I said to myself, "Hmmm... bummer. Must be an outage. I'll just check back tomorrow."
Checked a few minutes ago, and obviously it's down. From what you guys have posted, this is a nasty outage
You know what... it doesn't bother me at all. I'm a tech lead and senior developer - and have had to deal with fixing chaos just like this. I know all too well what you're going through... and appreciate it.
I know you guys will get 'er up and runnin' soon. This stuff takes time and CAREFUL attention to detail so you don't have to rebuild things more than once. I'd rather you take the time to get it right.
Besides, it's unlikely anyone's campaign or session is genuinely in jeopardy while we wait for our PDFs. In the meantime, we can always refer to my favorite rule which basically says "when in doubt, improvise".
Love the PF RPG products and all the ways you've revived the d20 system for us old timers.
FWIW, I'm involved with a 30+ year long campaign (been going since 1979), and about a year ago I moved the whole group to Pathfinder! w00t. I just finished redrawing our 30 year old world maps in full color (Photoshop). They were all simple pencil-drawn maps and needed a full re-imagining. I set 'em up online so we wouldn't lose 'em to old age! If ya wanna see (World of Timnath Map).
Sorry for blathering! Looking forward to much much more from Paizo! When things go sideways - as they are likely to do - we know you'll take care of it.
-KP
Though I would like to ask that next time the warnings come with a bright red background with bold white letters. I didn't see the warning until just now.Like this?
Yup, exactly. I thought my computer was having issues, then I thought it was a problem with my account. So I decided to see if someone else had that issue, and that's when I found this thread.
Though in hindsight, I guess this serves to show how unobservant I can be. :D
See - told ya they'd have the lights back on soon. I didn't expect five minutes later! But hey - I'll take it. :)
Got my three PDFs just fine.
Yay!!!
Awesome, thanks for the hard work! As a Server admin myself, I know how it can be at times!
Awesome work to the tech team for dealing with this so quickly. From what I can tell it was a pretty nasty thing to have to deal with the same day subscriptions started shipping.
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Sorry I haven't posted prior to this; I was kind of busy today.
I'd just like to clarify that the delay in getting things back up is not driven by our desire PDF security (though I make no apology for that desire; it's very important to our business). While it's true that the personalizer—the application that watermarks PDFs—is down, so is the step before and the step after that, which is to say that even if we didn't watermark anything, we still wouldn't be serving PDFs right now.
This situation should end soon, though—Gary is about to make a delivery to our colocation facility; we'll have some testing to do once things are in place, so I can't give you a specific timeline right now.
I've already done some things to ensure that if the same unlikely circumstance happens again, we'll be able to recover from it a lot faster, and in the coming days, I'll be working to make sure that the unlikely circumstance is made even more unlikely.
In other words you hit quantity "2" when ordering all the backup parts? =p