Suggestions

[puggsoy]

I made a thread a few weeks ago about a batch download feature, and I have an addendum to that:

I know you guys said that system was in place for a few people, but due to the hardware the servers run on it's not feasiable for that to be a large scale, publiclly usable service.

In the event it becomes more feasible, but not enough to where everybody can do it whenever, I have a better idea then the ad or pay for a perrinmium account ideas: ranks/points.

Basically, the more assets you contribute to the resource, or for other good things you do, get you points or level up, and then your level or points is used to determine/pay for batch downloads.

This isn't that different to the payment idea, if anything it's worse. For one, it doesn't address the server fee issue. It'll also encourage people who simply want to download a large number of sheets to churn out low quality, likely incomplete sheets just to get their "points".
It also adds a level of competition to the submissions. One thing I personally love about TSR is that all the submissions are done fully by free will and people who just enjoy ripping resources and sharing them. If you introduce points this will take away this charm and make it more competitive. Users who submit the most might also feel superior, and/or vice versa, similar to the premium idea.

And even if all the above would work out, it still wouldn't be a good idea.

More importantly though, this isn't an issue of revenue - it's an issue of resources. Believe it or not, we actually already have the system you're requesting in place but it's temporary and limited to only those participating in the icon renovation. Even in this limited environment, we've run into some issues with the script failing on larger games. Trying to release a feature that's already problematic to a tiny portion of our user base out to the public only invites disaster.

For the curious, the issue we're seeing with this feature is that the script basically takes too long to build the zip file for very large games. The easy solution is to simply increase the limit for processing time but doing so then adds the risk of overloading the server as more and more people attempt to use long-running scripts. So, short of investing in infrastructure far beyond the scope of this project to handle load balancing, there's simply no feasible way to make this happen.

The point system wouldn't fix this, there would quickly be a good number of people with access to this feature.

I can understand that downloading hundreds of resources would become tedious, but I'm afraid the only real option is to tough it out and do it by hand.

EDIT: I just reread your post and noticed you said "In the event it becomes more feasible". In that case the staff might consider it, but even so you'd have to give the feature to everybody or nobody to avoid seperation between users.