Downloading teases, question for the staff

[janmb]

I am aware of a few people having tried to download teases from milovana in different ways and for different reasons. I am also aware that this has been turned down/rejected based on some more or less vague explanations of this demanding a lot of server bandwidth or load.

Now, my question is basically based on not buying that explanation for a second. Either I am misunderstanding what staff has tried to say, or it is simply a poor excuse to cover some other, real reason.

Whenever anyone run a tease, regardless of being flash vs. normal, they download all the flash content, all the text, and all the images. Not all at once, but all during the duration of the tease.

In comparison, where they to download the entire tease with the intention of later play it at their local computer, they would need to download precisely the same data, no more, no less. And now the important bit: They would do it once. Instead of once every single time they want to run the tease.

So in short, what is the real concern with letting people download teases to run them offline? The bandwidth argument is pure bogus anyway. If it's to do with adverts, rights management or whatever, say so, but at least come clean with the real reason.

And just to be clear, not asking these hard questions just to put people up against the wall, but for far more constructive and important reasons than that: Being able to download teases would greatly enhance the use and utility of this site - it would be more versatile for the users, and bandwidth usage would be reduced.

Best regards,
Jan

[baultista]

A flash tease would likely be stored in your browser cache while viewing it. If you wanted to save it for later, you could go dig up the .swf file from your temporary files folder and see if it works.

I don't know if the swf requires a teaseID or a server connection to run. By default, flash doesn't cache assets (they're all stored within the file itself) but that can be circumvented by design and code on the part of the Milovana team.

[janmb]

Thanks, but I'm not really discussing how to achieve this - I'm discussing site policies - and seeing if I can put to death what I believe is a big misconception when it comes to what takes bandwidth and not.

[green]

Yeah, also downloading flash teases is not that simple, baultista ;).

[seraph0x]

Whenever anyone run a tease, regardless of being flash vs. normal, they download all the flash content, all the text, and all the images. Not all at once, but all during the duration of the tease.

Of course it doesn't matter from a bandwidth standpoint if somebody downloads one tease. What has caused us a lot of problems in the past are the people who download all teases. People's crawlers have managed to cause server overload and even downtime.

I am also aware that this has been turned down/rejected

We have never banned downloaders unless they were putting more than a certain number of requests per minute against our servers. Our stance is and always has been that we don't encourage it, but we don't try and stop people either.

Whenever anyone run a tease, regardless of being flash vs. normal, they download all the flash content, all the text, and all the images. Not all at once, but all during the duration of the tease.

They actually download about 30% (FlashTeases) or 50% (regular) of the tease on average. With regular teases this is due simply because most users don't finish every tease they start and with FlashTeases there is the additional aspect that often a single session only explores certain paths through the tease and so not all content is actually triggered.

So I agree with you, downloading individual teases isn't that big a deal. The problem is with those who download the entire archive. Sometimes we even see the same people download the site several times for whatever reason. The downloaders represent about 0.005% of our users and cause about 5% of our traffic, i.e. they consume 1000x their fair share.

Another aspect that aggravates the problem is that regular traffic is pretty steady, but the download traffic is very peaky, so most of the reserve capacity we have to book is due to the downloaders.

So in short, what is the real concern with letting people download teases to run them offline? The bandwidth argument is pure bogus anyway.

The bandwidth reason is real - by prepackaging teases I think we would encourage the collector mindset and see a lot more whole archive downloading.

Of course you're right in that there are other reasons for not offering downloads. Most importantly the promotional content agreements that content owners are willing to grant are usually either ambiguous on the matter or ban downloads outright.

Another reason is that we want people to hang out on the site. Not just for ads, but also because Milovana is based on community participation and when folks are spending time on the site they are one click away from posting in the forums or even writing their own teases.

You're absolutely right that the bandwidth argument got a lot more air time than it deserved. Our relations with content owners are vitally important to the survival of the site so I try to avoid making public statements that touch on that subject. I hope you can empathize.

Thanks for the excellent post!

[janmb]

I completely agree with the community aspect Seraph

Main reasons to support downloading/offline teases would be to
1: Remove the traffic generated by the steady users of the site who typically run their favourite teases several times a week and
2: Have the option of running teases when/where they don't have any Internet connection

A further thought to consider in this direction would obviously be Bit Torrent and similar technologies, where traffic load is even further reduced from a server standpoint.

And thanks for the comprehensive reply btw

[Human]

So has anyone found a way to download the flash teases ?

[green]

So has anyone found a way to download the flash teases ?

well there is a way... someone even posted a working concept with code...
It's actually not that hard to download the tease...

The harder part ist to write an Viewer+Compiler to Display the Teases using Milovana's Flash tease scripting language.. You need to do some reverse engineering here..

Another Idea would be to download the original flash thease viewer(.swf file), decompile it and direct it to offline resources.. probably the easiest way, to get the stone rolling ;)..

~green~