Content hosting at SourceForge?

[Caydr]

I said it seemed unprofessional to the consumer..

How many consumers did you ask if they found "Sourceforge" unprofessional?

[Neddie]

I said it seemed unprofessional to the consumer..

How many consumers did you ask if they found "Sourceforge" unprofessional?

Not a representative population (In fact, substantially better educated and in theory less prone to the psychological trends observed), only a few hundred, and it was not about SourceForge but about the observed problems people have with common/free tools and systems. If you don't tell somebody they're using Linux, Spring or GIMP and/or don't mention the free element, they respond much, much better - just a side note. Anyway, I am not going to run a study for every case of applied normative social psychology. In fact, for the foreseeable future I plan to run as few studies as possible... application is my present focus.

Let me make this clear to you. In general, people respond less favorably to common or shared resources and tools, just as they do to free products. Perhaps it is the result of relational thought, perhaps the result of social pressures and expectation - which is something I'd love to write at length about - but free and shared objects are interpreted as inferior. A free product is "cheap" or "incomplete". A shared service is "risky" or "unprofessional". It isn't difficult to understand.

A project hosted on a project site, registered particularly for that project, backed with project hosted downloads... that simply scans better for the average populace, regardless of merit. While we are on the topic, people prefer short urls (woot), short names (Yahoo) and untaxing taglines ("Victims, aren't we all?" is about as complex as you can go).

This is a reason why some businesses keep otherwise expensive elements of their business model in house, even though it would be much cheaper to outsource - distribution, marketing, servers. This has been overcome to some extent, in some specialties, by the rise of "professional consulting" but I digress.

Well, I've wasted three minutes here.

[Caydr]

So, what you're saying is, Spring-Files, which is upwards upwards of $500 USD a month for bandwidth, and is presently begging for money ( http://www.springfiles.com/donate.php ) should not use Sourceforge, because begging is much more professional.

[BrainDamage]

per year not per month ...

[Licho]

He could probably get a better deal.

I pay roughly 500Ôé¼ / year for dedicated server that hosts spring site/server out of my pocket. And it at least has unlimited bandwidth and 250GB disk.

[lurker]

For the same bandwidth as he has I pay $120 a year for my VPS. Also refer to my earlier comment where I said he wouldn't need 300GB if the mirrors were highly encouraged.

[Licho]

To encourage people to use mirrors -> make sure that downloader system is reliable -> allow it to use jj itself if there are no mirrors..

[Tobi]

And fix the site so mirrors are kept in sync properly. (I often still see files that are only on jobjol.)

[AF]

I pay a fraction of that, and I currently host the majority of the bandwidth of all the filesites on my darkstars mirror. It regularly overtakes the other mirrors and all the other filesites including jjs site itself, and i still have terabytes of bandwidth still going unused.

I can easily host the entire spring ecosystems file hosting requirements. The only thing i cannot do is stuff that requires a dedicated or virtual host, for which we have numerous users running around these forums with their own servers.

[Caydr]

I'm confusing my point, I think. I just wanted to make Sourceforge a better-known possibility for non-official Spring file sites, and instead it's turned into a pissing match over whether it's "professional" or not. I don't really care anymore, I just wanted to help out in whatever small way I can.

If people want to pay out of their own pocket, it's very noble and I'm sure everyone appreciates their generosity. At the same time, if it's costing you a lot of money to the extent you have to beg for donations, or load times are ridiculously long as in SpringInfo's widget page, Sourceforge is a goldmine. Since I personally don't have the money to make donations right now, I thought a gift of knowledge like this might be just as valuable. I didn't realize there would be so much resistance to the notion of saving money, but that's your choice, I won't try and force it on you anymore.

[Nemo]

SourceForge also requires that everything hosted there is under some open source license, a qualifier that few of our maps and none of the *A mods can meet. While maps just need a re-licensing from their creator, the *A mods can't really pull that trick off.

You can, of course, just ignore that (like AA did) but you run the risk of SF pulling the plug and deleting all of your files at any time for hosting stuff on their servers that are outside their ToS. So there's that. Given the amount of bandwidth a file hosting site would pull, I'm sure we would get SF's attention sooner rather than later.

[Caydr]

They're not that strict, there are a ton of projects like AA with legally gray materials.

AA was shut down once, for about 3 days. I explained exactly what the mod included, INCLUDING all the gray area things, after which they reinstated the account. They're not run by Stalin you know.

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Edit, regarding bandwidth:

Absolute Annihilation (OTA), has used approximately 1,858,214 mb of bandwidth. It includes virtually all of the same content as AA:Spring, plus a lot more.

Total Annihilation: Twilight, a mod based on AA:OTA, has used approximately 234,408 mb of bandwidth. It includes just as many legally gray materials as AA:OTA did.

AA:OTA and TA:T have both released map packs. These map packs do not have ANY licenses, actual or implied. Combined, the three map packs in question have used approximately 3,531,918 mb of bandwidth.

AA:Spring, containing all the goodies you know about, between 1.32 and 2.3b2, assuming an average file size of 8 mb and not including any patches, used approximately 380,952 mb of bandwidth. Between 1.31 and 1.0, assuming an average file size of 17 mb and not including any patches, used approximately 88,757 mb of bandwidth. Between 0.32 and 0.1, assuming an average file size of 9 mb, it used 15,354 mb of bandwidth.

Altored Divide and Altored Arctic combined used about 51,182 mb of bandwidth. Neither of these maps were released with any kind of defined license.

In summary, all of AA's Spring content combined comes to about 536,245 mb of bandwidth usage, just over half a terabyte. All of AA's and TA:T's OTA content bandwidth usage comes to 5,624,540 mb, over five and a half terabytes.

Statistics taken from: http://sourceforge.net/projects/ta-aa/files/

In other words, AA and its related content has used over 6 terabytes of bandwidth, and hasn't been shut down. Do you really think that the comparatively tiny (in size per file) Spring maps and mods are going to get their attention if I didn't already?

Also interesting is that the aforementioned OTA-related content used vastly more bandwidth than the Spring-related content and a much greater percentage of it was legally questionable.

Your worries are completely unfounded.

[Nemo]

Don't bother. I realize that SF is a site with effectively unlimited bandwidth resources, but I maintain that they'd at least take notice if they started getting hit for a few hundred gb a month on a newly registered project. To do otherwise would just be foolish of them, and I assume that they're not idiots.

Edit: The reason I say this is the distinct lack of warez or illegal music found for download using SF servers.

Further edit: As far as TA stuff goes...I know this isn't a terribly popular idea, but OTA content isn't 'grey area'. It is very clearly and firmly illegal. If people pulled out all the artistic content (sounds, models, textures) from Company of Heroes or SupCom and started distributing it, you can bet issues would arise. I love that it has given Spring such life and inspiration, but...there's no much of a debate when it comes to questioning the legality of it.

[Caydr]

Bump, please read my previous post's edit. 6 terabytes. They didn't blink. And that doesn't even include files I deleted when they became out of date.

Among the first files I published on my SF account was Absolute Annihilation (OTA) v6, which has been responsible for 1,858,214 mb of traffic. Averaged through its lifespan, that is 39.5 gigabytes per month.

Adding maps to the equation, you get 21.8 gb/month for map pack 1 and 40.4 gb / month for Map Pack 2, giving a grand total of 101.7 gigabytes per month for the AA:OTA files alone.

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Edit: I forgot about Nuggenman's map pack. It accounts for an additional 350,187.7 mb of traffic, or an average of 8.8 gb / month.

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When they did shut me down for a couple of days (very early in AA's lifespan), my argument was simple: All the files are available elsewhere for free (bugfix, uberhack, TAUIP, TAUCP, UTASP, every other mod that relies on replacing the GP3).

"OK, no problem then."

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edit regarding "gray" ota content: I call it gray because, as previously stated, it is freely available elsewhere. If AA didn't exist, someone else would do it, as shown by BA's rise to fame.

[Nemo]

Just going from jobjol stats, the various spring file sites have put out 240gb of files so far in August. If something of that magnitude coming from a startup project (not to mention sticking ~19gb of stuff on their servers) doesn't make them take notice, they don't have any competent server admins. And because its sourceforge, they almost certainly do.

[Caydr]

I showed the per month average, read the post again. Altogether 110+ gb a month for OTA stuff alone, assuming that OTA to this date is still played as much as it used to be... which it isn't. So in early days, the monthly average would have been considerably higher. I didn't factor this into my math though since any figures would be pure conjecture.

The math does take into account each file's differing original post date though. Feel free to verify any of my numbers. There's the off chance I might've added a download count twice or skipped one, but I would estimate my accuracy to be within +/- 5%.

Perhaps they have competent admins, but they're also reasonable people, not the fascists you make them out to be?

[Nemo]

Of course they're lovely people, I have no doubt. My point is that you couldn't hope to be 'ignored' with a single project of that impact in terms of space and bandwidth usage - at the very least they'd ask about what it was (and if they got a proper answer, I imagine they'd take it down. The Sims 3 is 'freely available' via torrents, but I don't think sourceforge would like hosting that particular bit of content).

Anyways. If you feel strongly about it, get 'er done - talk to jj about mirroring over to sourceforge and let us know how it goes. I'd love to be pleasantly surprised here.

[Caydr]

I might do just that.

One more thing, people reading this are probably thinking "Well they probably didn't realize what you were going to post! They'd never do it again!"

If indeed that was the case, why did they, 3› years later (Dec 2007 vs June 2004), approve Twilight's version of the mod for hosting?

edit: they also approved Tired's as-yet-unreleased version as well.

[Nemo]

Probably because nobody made it clear what it was.

http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/sitele ... WARRANTIES

See A) and B).

[Caydr]

Except me, when I explained in detail what it was.