Time wasting download and file naming

[Grimtina]

So for the first time my husband just ordered a 3PP bundle from here. turns out he will now need hours to dl 60+ files all one by one, with at least 5 secs each time before the file, maybe, will begin to download. A few times now he got stuck and had to repeat the process. Additionally, the file names are all a mess inside the zips due to the misplaced need to encrypt them. Which means I will later have to go through all the dang files to rename them. With my bad eyes, that will take an eternity. Time I do not really have. Asides of that, time is money, and what we saved with the bundle we will have to spend twice on dealing with this method.

Who thinks of an insane time consuming process like this? Who has time to waste on such matters, when in other stores, you can at least dl 10 files at once at it will not exchange th4e names of the files with some silly code.

What is also bad is that his credit card info got stored automatically, which is a big red flag for us. Ask if you want to store such sensitive information please. instead of just taking.

Needless to say, husband is fuming and I'm also quite annoyed. We will not use the Paizo store anymore, unless for free products, until this changes to something sensible. It would be a good thing to make this process easier, as I doubt we are the only ones preferring a quick, simple download.

[Diego Valdez]

Hello Grimtina,

Thank you for all of the feedback. I have passed it along.

The downloads page is something we do have an interest in updating. Right now each PDF needs to be personalized before being downloaded, which is why each has to be individually clicked on. The file names aren't for encryption purposes. They are the product codes, or SKUs, associated with those products. I found a comment from our Chief Technical Officer, Vic Wertz discussing why this is the case here:

Vic Wertz wrote:

Drakli wrote:

Wouldn't it be easier to find and sort if they read, "Pathfinder Companion: Second Darkness Player’s Guide.pdf" or the like. Would be easier for me anyway.

It would be easier, but:

• Windows XP and other Windows OSs forbid some characters ( \ / : * ? " < > | )
  
• Spaces can be inconvenient for people using command-line tools, as they have to be escaped or part of quoted strings
  
• The HFS file system used by old Macs limits file names to 31 characters (HFS+ did away with that limit 10 years ago, but some folks still have HFS-formatted drives)
  
• The NTFS file system has a 255-character limit for the entire file path, so even 57-character file names like the one you suggested could be a problem for people who have nested folders with long names
  
• Some versions of Windows (probably those running on NTFS, but I'm not sure) have a 250-character limit for file paths, so the above problem applies to them
  

Now, we could come up with a more title-based name following all of those rules, but we'd have to make sure it's unique. While "PComp_SD_PG.PDF" might seem reasonable now, what if we do another AP with the initials "SD?"

Since we know product codes are usually short and always unique, they're an easy solution to the problem.

I would be happy to remove your husbands card information from his account, but I would need to know what his account is to do that. If you, or him send an email to [e-mail] with or from the email address attached to his Paizo.com account I will get that taken care of.