Fixed, thanks for the report.

It seems that none of the downloads that were supposed to be available starting on January 8th are working. "File not found" as it says.

Anyway, thanks for the effort!

Fixed. Thanks for the report.

"The Secret of the Sword" download link is broken.

Glad it's working now

Maybe it's late or I'm too tired, but I don't understand, Download manager can not work, I only can download it by clicking link?

Wait, I managed to capture a link with download manager.
Did you managed to implement a resume feature?

Works fine, guess I was hotheaded
a little bit!

Edited by niko32 at 00:04 on August, 24th 2006

You should be able to resume the download within the three-hour timeframe. Not by clicking the download link on the site again, though, this will start a new download. You have to do it from within the program you used for the first download.

Edited by Mr Creosote at 23:34 on August, 24th 2006

Argh!!! Same thing hapenned again when I tried to download my second file?

Yes, that number is the the number of milliseconds between January 1st, 1970 and the time you started the download. I don't want to go into too much technical detail as it'd most likely be boring for everyone else, so I'll just say I'm working with temporary files there (the file is deleted after three hours, and to measure the age, a timestamp is used; it also makes the filename unique). This might be a bit strange for visitors (the weird filename), but it won't hurt and can be easily changed client-side.

I put it in so that people can get working downloads. It's 'kind of' temporary, meaning I would like to replace it again, but I don't know with what yet. If and when I come up with something better, I'll remove this system again. Since it's working and 'kind of safe' at the moment, I'm not so hard-pressed to change it in the near future. My top priority would be to fix the old code which caused the problems anyway, because it is the ultimate solution in theory.

Edited by Mr Creosote at 23:31 on August, 24th 2006

Great! Huge Thanks!

Sorry I was offline for almost a day! (that's the good thing about dial-ups )

Tho, strangly enough, my download got a number now at the end of a filename: star_final--11564522912948.rar (just a notice, possibly because of your modification)



Now I wander if this modification is just for your testing purpose or it's gonna stay untill you find better solution, since I'm gonna need probably a couple of months to download MOTU collection?

Edited by niko32 at 23:24 on August, 24th 2006

That's great niko, what about you?

Yep, works now.

Unfortunately, while working on the code, I found a fatal flaw in my reasoning, so I had to abandon the idea entirely. Instead, I've put in a quick and dirty hack which should do it for now. It's flawed, too, because it's a huge waste of resources and the maximum download time is limited, but I've put in three hours now (I calculated how long it would take to download 20MB with 2KB/s - this is twice as big as the largest file and slower than what everyone should get on the slowest dial-ups, so I hope it's enough).

Please let me know if you can download the comics succcessfully now. In the meantime, I'll try to come up with a better download scheme, but I'm out of ideas for now.

Edited by Mr Creosote at 11:22 on August, 24th 2006

You are apsolutely right about people who don't want to speak about it, most of them probably just don't want to bother with that.

Well, I definitly learned something today. And beside my wish to download those comics I hope that I've contributed a little bit in diagnostics of problem and wish You luck in improving your site to become more user friendly to all of us doomed on dial-up connections.

Makes little difference to me personally, I already grabbed all the comics ages ago, and burned them to CD.

Would it be possible to make the script/server allow resuming? That wouldn't be an ideal solution, but at least it'd provide some way for those on dialup to get the files.

As I said, this requires a rewrite now. I think I'll have the first version up tomorrow, but I don't know what problems I'll encounter in the process, so don't hold your breath.

First of all, I'm sure there are many more people suffering from this. However, it's a common behaviour not to say anything about it. Unexplainable, but fact. Second, this is connection related. When I download something from the site myself, I never get less than 100kb/s, usually a few times that value. So a 4MB download is over quickly, it takes a lot less time than when you run into the problem. High downstream speeds are common these days, so these people don't even notice any problem.

Eh! The problem lingers on!

I hope you will someday find time, will... to maybe change the system altogether.

Still one thing is left unanswered: Why only few of us have problem with those download links?

Same old, same old.

Right, I've uploaded what I consider the last try with this script version now. I doubt it'll change anything, but try it anyway.

If the problem persists, I'll have to think of changing the system altogether. I do have a basic idea, but it would involve larger changes / rewrites of the code, of course.

Edited by Mr Creosote at 19:34 on August, 23rd 2006

Once again it completed when it wasn't suppose to complete.