The Cover Project

General Category => News and Announcements => Topic started by: Snowcone on April 23, 2019, 10:32:04 AM

Title: Please Don't Download Everything
Post by: Snowcone on April 23, 2019, 10:32:04 AM
Hi Folks

It looks like the CDN is working great, which is awesome. Unfortunately I've now made it super easy for people to walk the entire site and pull down the entire 60GB file archive. This has ballooned our bandwidth from 800GB/month to 2TB with a week to go. If you'd like a full archive of the contents of the site, please shoot me an email at sbgamescone [at] gmail.com

I'm happy folks want to archive things, but this behavior puts us at risk financially.
Title: Re: Please Don't Download Everything
Post by: Bear78 on April 23, 2019, 10:51:59 AM
Is this actual users or is it bots doing this?
Title: Re: Please Don't Download Everything
Post by: Snowcone on April 23, 2019, 02:32:09 PM
That's actually unclear. If you do the math, we are up 1TB which is 15 people pulling down the full archive. Our robots.txt tells bots not to follow those links so no telling.
Title: Re: Please Don't Download Everything
Post by: razielleonhart on April 23, 2019, 07:33:47 PM
Just threw you a email as I been in need of this for a few projects and was hating getting covers 1 by 1.
Title: Re: Please Don't Download Everything
Post by: jmcree on June 14, 2019, 08:00:21 AM
I sent an email about getting the archive and possibly hosting a mirror but no reply yet.
Title: Re: Please Don't Download Everything
Post by: DanTheMan827 on June 26, 2019, 11:51:21 AM
to help mitigate it, why not provide a torrent of everything and release updated ones every so often?

Also, why not use cloudflare and tell the images to never expire?
Title: Re: Please Don't Download Everything
Post by: ShoothimNow on June 26, 2019, 03:15:46 PM
To help mitigate it even more, just shut down all of TheCoverProject site and place it all on torrents.  Sounds like a great idea.  I'm sure no one will troll people and place virus's into the tor files.  ::)

That way Snow no longer needs to pay for the servers and will never have another headache again from people asking "why not do torrents".

*Edit* Dan, if you are the same Dan from Hakchi2, I really do thank you for your time, but people can't be trusted... and websites compress images really badly.  To my knowledge, I have never heard of anyone hosting a torrent collection and us asking them to take it down... I could be wrong.  
Title: Re: Please Don't Download Everything
Post by: Tech13 on June 26, 2019, 06:38:32 PM
If I thought I could get away with hosting the images on my gsuite for education account. I would offer, but that may get me fired at work.
Title: Re: Please Don't Download Everything
Post by: DanTheMan827 on June 30, 2019, 08:11:46 PM
To help mitigate it even more, just shut down all of TheCoverProject site and place it all on torrents.  Sounds like a great idea.  I'm sure no one will troll people and place virus's into the tor files.  ::)

That way Snow no longer needs to pay for the servers and will never have another headache again from people asking "why not do torrents".

*Edit* Dan, if you are the same Dan from Hakchi2, I really do thank you for your time, but people can't be trusted... and websites compress images really badly.  To my knowledge, I have never heard of anyone hosting a torrent collection and us asking them to take it down... I could be wrong. 

I wasn't saying take the site down, I was saying provide an official means for those who want to grab the entire cover set without putting the bandwidth cost on Snowcone

There are and always have been ways to scrape and download all the covers, a torrent would eliminate the scraping.

The only person that could insert a virus into a torrent is the person that created the torrent (which would be Snowcone)

and yeah, I'm the same DanTheMan827 from Hakchi2

Some people want to grab a few covers as needed, some want to download/archive the whole lot.
Title: Re: Please Don't Download Everything
Post by: Arseen on June 30, 2019, 11:25:05 PM
Some people want to grab a few covers as needed, some want to download/archive sell the whole lot.
Not you but you understand our reluctance as this can danger us with copyright stuff.
Title: Re: Please Don't Download Everything
Post by: DanTheMan827 on July 09, 2019, 01:02:03 PM
Some people want to grab a few covers as needed, some want to download/archive sell the whole lot.
Not you but you understand our reluctance as this can danger us with copyright stuff.
Okay, sure...

Regardless though, it would probably be wise to put this entire website (including the images) behind cloudflare with a cache expiration set far in the future

I'd also like to point out that it has always been possible to save this entire website with various programs
Title: Re: Please Don't Download Everything
Post by: Habanero on July 10, 2019, 01:02:26 PM
Some people want to grab a few covers as needed, some want to download/archive sell the whole lot.
Not you but you understand our reluctance as this can danger us with copyright stuff.
Copyright... covers fall under fair use my dude. Companies don't care about anyone scanning covers from 20 years ago. Gaming Alexandria's doing just fine. Retromag is doing just fine (and they also host torrents). Viruses... this isn't the 90's. Even basic Microsoft Defender is enough nowadays (+MD5 checks). And yes, websites are very easy to scrape.
Title: Re: Please Don't Download Everything
Post by: stratosvx on July 10, 2019, 04:13:15 PM
Copyright... covers fall under fair use my dude.
If it is the work of an individual, the copyright lasts 70 years past the lifetime of the individual. In a contracted work (which these covers would fall under), the copyright lasts 95 years past the original publication date. This site doesn't sell covers, but if the gaming companies determined that the site posed a financial threat to them, they could have it shut down.
Title: Re: Please Don't Download Everything
Post by: tjsynkral on July 10, 2019, 04:21:25 PM
Copyright... covers fall under fair use my dude.
If it is the work of an individual, the copyright lasts 70 years past the lifetime of the individual. In a contracted work (which these covers would fall under), the copyright lasts 95 years past the original publication date. This site doesn't sell covers, but if the gaming companies determined that the site posed a financial threat to them, they could have it shut down.

This is why people want to download Everything.
Title: Re: Please Don't Download Everything
Post by: Habanero on July 10, 2019, 04:21:55 PM
I think you're being paranoid, but in any case that's even more reason to release up-to-date torrents in case this site gets taken down (not that I think it ever will).