Why didn't I think of this perfect solution?

Edited by Mr Creosote at 07:41 on February, 18th 2004

Nope, I wasnt aware of that.

The SDSL market is still too young for the big ISP's to offer residential packages. If/when they do prices will plummet. In UK, upto very recently there have only been a couple of ISP's offering SDSL, and only in greater London. Now though, the BT Behemoth are jumping on the bandwaggon - prices are going to tumble, soon. Dont know the state of the German market though, but I imagine its probably slightly more developed than ours.

Sit tight for a while, in the UK it will be a lot more affordable by the end of this year.

You could get another couple of ADSL lines, buy yourself a DSLAM that supports packet-level port bonding and away you go! Triple your upstream bandwidth. That will only cost a couple of thousand or ten

Erm.... you are aware that I'm already having these file hosted on my home computer? It's not SDSL (because that's completely impossible to afford), but it's the best I can get at realistic prices here.

Is there an SDSL service available in your area?

If yes, how much is the SDSL service, is it cheaper than your host charges for bandwidth?

If you can answer yes to both questions then you have your answer. The only issue is reliability/reduncancy. Backups are a pain in the arse.

Breaker: Good in theory, but again, cases of sites which have tried this show where it leads eventually: a site full of stolen contents. Because it's so much cooler (and easier) just to copy a review from somewhere else and get the "d/l" instead of writing your own

Even ignoring that problem, there is another one with this. 'Forcing' people who are interested in big files (which usually equals pretty new games) to add more games will get even more big games into the archive, because that's the type of game these people are interested in. So, it would again result in more big downloads, more people interested in downloading them and so on.

Yeah, I just figured I'd throw that out there.

Even limiting the days to the server would just compound the problem...

Maybe let them rate a game or write a review, might be interesting, but again, this will be abused.

Tuss: I see two problems. It forces people to do something they chose not to do (posting in a forum). And (I might be wrong here, but it's my impression) the 'voluntary' regulars don't seem to be too interested in getting downloads anyway.

Tapuak: Thanks for the offer, but I don't really think it'd help on the long term. For these extremely popular files, we'd need something 'bulky'.

Well, I can offer to put some files on my webspace in order to improve the situation a little bit, but you know that my bandwidth is strictly limited, too...

How about anytime somebody makes a valuable contribution to the dicussions in the Spam Club, the get some points, and after so many points, they get a download

The average use isn't so critical at the moment. It's again the big files eating bandwidth.

x: number of downloads
n: file size
x ~ n^2

Damn kiddies

The current solution (big files relocated to my home connection) is maxed out with two thirds of the clients being rejected every day.

I can either just continue dropping most download attempts or restrict the number of people who are 'allowed' to download these expensive files somehow. How? Didn't think that far yet.

Opinions?