Blend Swap Download Changes

A letter from Matthew Muldoon, owner of Blend Swap: Over the past 3 years I have seen Blend Swap become more than I had ever expected. It has grown leaps and bounds, from the first official Durian Modeling Sculpt, to hitting the 2,000 model mark on the site just a few weeks back, and starting the development on version 4 of the website. These are things I could have never imagined happening when I started this site.

It has been amazing, but along with all the highs have come many lows also, from poor hosting, to website malfunctions, and server restrictions. These are things that Jonathan and I have struggled through and have tried to fix as fast as possible.

As most of you know we recently updated our hosting to a VPS which has allowed the site to run much more efficiently and actually work most of the time, it was very graciously donated to us by Alex of Metalix.co.nz but with a more reliable server with more power and memory unfortunately came restrictions on bandwidth, which is the new issue we are facing now.

Moving forward we will begin limiting downloads. This will go into effect tonight 11-11-11.

Trust me when I say this is something I wish we could avoid, but I don't see a way for this to happen with the current way the site is set up. So what exactly does this mean? We will start breaking users into groups and each group will have a certain amount of bandwidth they are allowed to use per week, until we can find either a better solution or a permanent solution for bandwidth.

Unregistered users and Registered users not sharing blends:

If you have not registered an account on Blend Swap, or have an account but haven't shared any models you will have 100mb of downloads a week.

Registered Users sharing blends:

You will have the base of 100mb a week of downloads, you will also receive 5mb a week extra for each approved blend you share, up to 10 blends. For a grand max of 150mb a week for those who have shared 10 blends or more.

Download limits run Monday to Sunday then reset, if you don't use your mb they do not rollover into the next week, this would defeat the purpose of trying to bring down bandwidth.

Because bandwidth is based on your sharing there will be a much more stringent approval process on models allowed on the site, we don't want a flood of crap models just so users can get more mb per week.

A new button will be added to the site as seen here, this will tell you how much memory you have, and how much you have left.

I know that there will probably be a lot of you that find this very disturbing, unacceptable, maybe even shady. Trust me when I say Jonathan and I have thought about this in depth, and we can see no other way of offering this site for free, without having some type of limitations on downloads, the site has just gotten to big to sustain itself so measures must be put in place to assure the site will still be around as it grows and so we still may be able to serve you with the great work so many have shared with all of us.

The survey we ran a couple of months ago showed that over 70% of the users surveyed said they download somewhere between 0-5 models a week, that along with the fact that 90% of our models are under 10mb so for most of you these restrictions should not effect how you use the site. However, if you have ideas, suggestions, comments, questions, or want to tell us how stupid this is, we want to hear about it in the comments. This site was created for you guys, we are open to all ideas and suggestions.

We are at this point because we could not find a better way to keep the site alive as it grows and still offer it for free. Hopefully one of you will have a better idea.

As always thank you all for helping make Blend Swap what it is today and helping make it what it will be in the future.

We look forward to your insights on this issue.

The Blend Swap Team matthew/mofx jonathan/savagecode