How does personalising work?

[Paul Limb]

Hi,

I'm a new user. Joined with the Humble Bundle.

I can understand the pdfs need to be watermarked and this takes time, but I'm unsure how the personalising system work.

Click the link
Wait for the personalising is performed.
Message says "Wait while personalising. Click the link in 10 seconds".

But if I wait for a while (10-15 minutes) and click the link, then I get "You backtracked too far.
The application backtracking limit of 30 has been exceeded."

If I wait 10 - 50 seconds, nothing happens.

When traffic is lighter, does the page refresh to tell me personalising is complete, or do you just keep trying at different intervals under it works?

If the page refreshes when personalising is complete, then I'm sure people will be patient and wait, but new users who are unfamiliar with the system aren't quite sure whether to keep pressing the link or wait?

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks

[Hawkmoon269]

Personalizing watermarks the PDF with your Name and email address. The problem is that right now the servers are being overwhelmed with the number of people attempting to download their new PDFs because of the Humble Bundle offering. See this thread for more info.

And welcome to the world of Pathfinder.

[Katina Davis]

Hello Paul,

Thank you for your question, and welcome to the Paizo.com community! Under normal website circumstances, the download link should behave like it would on lots of other sites. For smaller files, once personalizing is done, the download may start automatically or pop up a window to select where to save it. If that doesn't happen or the file is bigger, you'd just have to wait a little bit and then try the link again. Usually when I download files, it doesn't even take the full 10 seconds.

The backtracking error message is most likely because the request is timing out due to the increased traffic. Since all PDFs have to pass through our watermarker, it's been a bit of a bottleneck recently. Once things have calmed down, it should be much faster. The PDFs won't expire and they'll stay on your account, so you can download whenever you want and as often as you want.

We appreciate your patience! We hope that the temporary sluggishness of the site doesn't hamper your first experience with us. If there are any further questions or concerns that you may have, please don't hesitate to let us know and we'll be more than happy to help out.

Thanks, and have a great day!
Katina

[Paul Limb]

Thanks, that explains it.

I just wasn't sure if the download mechanism was something a little more odd.

I'll try again in a week or so when things have calmed down.