Whenever there's a game patch or somebody with lots of mods (cough albo) updates all of them, it takes forever to fill out the captcha for each one, click download, etc. It would be nice if there were a bulk download function. There could be a button next to each download called "add to download list" or "add to cart", then when you're finished selecting all the files you want, it would download one ZIP file with all of the individual mods' ZIP files within. This would make the update process much quicker. 

Like an online store. That actually sounds really cool. A lot of times I like changing my cars/ skins for all the model slots it takes upwards of an hour to go through all the download pages.

 

 

 

 

 

This is a good suggestion. Sometimes when I feel like playing with all of the plugins, after not playing for months, it would be nice to be able to download them all at once.

I had an idea for a system like this, but it was abandoned due to the fact I don't think we could afford the bandwidth, and right now I cannot commit the development time.

We reduce bandwidth costs heavily by utilizing a large cache between our frontend servers and our backend servers. Bandwidth from our backend servers is expensive, so we cache as much as we can on the frontend. We wouldn't be able to cache files as effectively without large architectural changes (we'd have to have some sort of nginx module which creates the ZIP from caches on the frontends). So far we've served around 10TB so far this month in bandwidth including files alone, and this figure doesn't even include general website, attachments and gallery traffic. If we utilized a CDN instead of our own solution, our bandwidth costs would be close to $1000/mo.

26 minutes ago, Cyan said:

I had an idea for a system like this, but it was abandoned due to the fact I don't think we could afford the bandwidth, and right now I cannot commit the development time.

We reduce bandwidth costs heavily by utilizing a large cache between our frontend servers and our backend servers. Bandwidth from our backend servers is expensive, so we cache as much as we can on the frontend. We wouldn't be able to cache files as effectively without large architectural changes (we'd have to have some sort of nginx module which creates the ZIP from caches on the frontends). So far we've served around 10TB so far this month in bandwidth including files alone, and this figure doesn't even include general website, attachments and gallery traffic. If we utilized a CDN instead of our own solution, our bandwidth costs would be close to $1000/mo.

Could you take an approach sort of like Ninite or the Visual Studio installer? Keep the big files on the cheap download server. Dynamically generate an EXE that when executed, fetches each of the required files from the server and puts them in the desired location. We can already get a direct download link from the web interface for our own uploads, so you would just need to get that list into the dynamically generated EXE. You could embed a token in the EXE and use a POST request for each file download, putting the token in the POST request, so that you can verify the download. That would allow you to add restrictions to prevent abuse, such as only allowing the large files to be downloaded from the same IP address the downloader was generated from, and for a limited number of times. 

1 minute ago, PNWParksFan said:

Could you take an approach sort of like Ninite or the Visual Studio installer? Keep the big files on the cheap download server. Dynamically generate an EXE that when executed, fetches each of the required files from the server and puts them in the desired location. We can already get a direct download link from the web interface for our own uploads, so you would just need to get that list into the dynamically generated EXE. You could embed a token in the EXE and use a POST request for each file download, putting the token in the POST request, so that you can verify the download. That would allow you to add restrictions to prevent abuse, such as only allowing the large files to be downloaded from the same IP address the downloader was generated from, and for a limited number of times. 

Perhaps if we had the development time.

On 15-6-2016 at 1:38 AM, Cyan said:

Perhaps if we had the development time.

I was working on a system that check if there is a new update available on a plugin, if there is a update available than download it to my server.
 

And checking with a Program on new updates if there is a new update it downloads the update from my server and installs it, but unfortunately the captcha was enabled again so I can't check for updates anymore :(

So is there any way my server IP can be whitelisted?

3 minutes ago, DuckTape said:

I was working on a system that check if there is a new update available on a plugin, if there is a update available than download it to my server.
 

And checking with a Program on new updates if there is a new update it downloads the update from my server and installs it, but unfortunately the captcha was enabled again so I can't check for updates anymore :(

So is there any way my server IP can be whitelisted?

Our system is intentionally built to prevent automated downloads for security reasons.