Quote:
Originally Posted by Princeton Cash
We are running strongbox on ahshanae.com right now but to be honest I do not understand the system and have no idea if its doing anything or not
I will say that quite a few times it has sent me emails to let me know when something suspect is going on. I think the only reason I am shopping around for our new sites is that I do not understand the SB admin interface.
I suspect it is working and doing its job as since we installed it we have seen a decrease in member area download traffic
... heres whats most important to me
I want to definitely limit member downloads ... no site rips
I want the system to keep track of abusive user activity so that if he downloads 2 gb one week and 1 gb the next the system knows and alerts me while stopping him at the same time
What would really realy be awesome is if one of these guys could team up with a DRM provider and integrate video DRM into their system 
That would be almost as pimp as Princeton Cash |
You and I are on the same wave length on all three points. You talked about looking
at downloads over a week or two. We're the only ones who track any more than one
day on downloads, I think. The first people to try limiting downloads did X GB per day,
of course, but that didn't work all that well. Much more interesting is looking a activity
over several days, so Throttlebox does that. A new member might legitimately have
heavy usage on their first day, but very heavy usage EVERY day might be something
you want to control. Also interesting is usage over a very short time - you might allow
500 pictures in a DAY, but 500 pictures in ten 10 minutes would be something to look at.
Really, 24 hours is a really bad time period to look at, because you might be counting
one evening's session, and you might be counting two, you don't know. 36 hours is
much more effective, because then at least you KNOW you're dealing with their
downloads from two evenings. We figured even better would be to track forever, so
that's what we do with Throttlebox. The more sophisticated "linear" limits, which
calculate a decaying average, aren't quite as easy to understand as "x GB per day",
but it's much more effective. Throttlebox also gives you the option of a simple
"x GB per day" limit if you want to keep things simple.
On the DRM, too, we've been putting research into that. Like limiting bandwidth,
the first few people to try it, doing it in a fairly simple way, didn't get very good
results. All of the big music sites tried DRM, and all of them dropped DRM when
it just didn't work very well. So we look at that and ask "how can we make DRM
smarter, so it'll work a lot better?" The general idea of DRM seems like it should
be good in THEORY, but in actual use it seems to frustrate paying customers more
than it frustrates the bad guys. So we're working with a couple of partners to do
DRM better - much better. We're also looking at some DRM alternatives to control
people posting your stuff without frustrating the paying customer.
Now that Throttlebox, our intelligent bandwidth limiter, and Clonebox, our enterprise
grade backup spare server system, are completed, the next thing on our list is
the redesign of Strongbox admin that you mentioned. We've made some small
changes to make it a bit more clear. The current admin interface works very well for
half the people, and less well for the other half, depending on how your brain works.
Of course, as mentioned in most of those emails that Strongbox sends you when
something happens, you generally don't need to do anything. Originally Strongbox
didn't have any admin interface, because it doesn't need one. I just does it's job
without needing your attention, but provides the admin interface so you can see
what's going on if you care to look.
The new interface will be "task oriented" - it will revolve around what you're trying to
DO. You log in to Strongbox for a reason - to do something. We'll give you the
options of what you can do and I think that will make much more sense to you.
The current interface is "system oriented" - designed so you can see how Strongbox
works, and that works very well for a lot of people. We would love to have your help
and feedback as we design the new system. What I mean is, first we need to make
a list of which things you want to do with the Strongbox admin. Then for each thing
you want to do we give you a simple way to do it, and ask you to let us know if you
see anything that could be more clear.
As we integrate some advanced new features from our research version of
Strongbox, we may hire a world reknown designer to help with the interface.
We have some really sophisticated features, based on crazily complex mathematics,
to add. Our challenge is to take all of the sophistication and make it appear
as simple as possible, but no simpler. We'd just love for you to be involved so
we can make exactly the interface you'd want. Please shoot us an email at
[email protected] . We're here to meet your needs and the best way
for us to do that is to work directly with you to make sure what we're doing is
exactly what you need.