Cardforge.org traffic stats

[Rob Cashwalker]

As I mentioned elsewhere, in May, the site hit its 30GB bandwidth limit. In the first 7 days of June it's already at 11GB!

In May, the 5/17 beta had been downloaded 517 times. The 5/31 beta has been downloaded 204 times.

In May, about 230 sets of card pics were downloaded. In June, about 80 sets of card pics have been downloaded so far.

I just submitted a change to the LQ Set Pic downloader to give a 35% chance to download pics from the URL supplied by SetInfo. Hopefully this will lighten the load a little bit.

[Chris H.]

The two 05-31-20011 archives on MediaFire have only been downloaded 92 times. Rares now has the two 05-31-20011 archives also on google. MediaFire + google + Cardforge = a total of 1019 downloads.

I wonder how many of these people are re-downloading all of the pics and are not moving over the pic files from the previous version?

[jeffwadsworth]

The two 05-31-20011 archives on MediaFire have only been downloaded 92 times. Rares now has the two 05-31-20011 archives also on google. MediaFire + google + Cardforge = a total of 1019 downloads.

I wonder how many of these people are re-downloading all of the pics and are not moving over the pic files from the previous version?

I would bet quite a few.

[Jaedayr]

Maybe when you post a new release include a reminder as to what images (cards, tokens, quest pics, etc) can be copied over to the new location after it is downloaded and set up. Save time and bandwidth.

[Chris H.]

Maybe when you post a new release include a reminder as to what images (cards, tokens, quest pics, etc) can be copied over to the new location after it is downloaded and set up. Save time and bandwidth.

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Yeah, that might help somewhat.

Then again, we have a sizable number of people who download from Rare's google page and most of these people may not bother to visit this site and see the message.

And there may be a group of people who only look for the beta release topic, and then download the files without taking the time to read the various messages.

Rob mentioned at one point that he may need to limit the number of cards that can be downloaded at one time, This would require people to re-execute the command time after time to get the full number of cards.

This may convince them to move over the pics folder from the previous version in order to avoid this situation.

[Corwin72]

Since NPH was not available for normal download I downloaded the full picture set. This may be the reason that more people are doing this.

[Jaedayr]

Then again, we have a sizable number of people who download from Rare's google page and most of these people may not bother to visit this site and see the message.

And there may be a group of people who only look for the beta release topic, and then download the files without taking the time to read the various messages.

You can lead people to a download but you can't make them read.

Perhaps Rares could also put a message with his download?

[mtgrares]

I can post a message about how you can move your card pictures instead of re-downloading them. Some of this is so simple to me and not obvious to other people.

Forge had an "Import Card Pictures" feature in the menu, could people use that option to copy the card pictures from a previous version? And if not, what does "Import Card Pictures" do?

[silly freak]

what would it take to move the pics folder out of the installation directory? I'm certain most people save their forge versions next to each other, so a common pics folder could ease things up?

[Rob Cashwalker]

The pics folder is configurable in one of the preference files. So the better question would be what would it take for the configuration to be easily editable in the user interface.

[friarsol]

The pics folder is configurable in one of the preference files. So the better question would be what would it take for the configuration to be easily editable in the user interface.

Maybe we can have a pseudo-installer. First time you run Forge, if that line in the config file doesn't exist (or that location doesn't exist), we ask the user to locate the directory to put images. Then just make sure the config file is in that state when new versions are released. Even better would be if our pseudo-installer would try moving those images over, so if the user deletes the old Forge, all pictures aren't lost.

[moomarc]

Not sure if I'm completely out of my depth here, but couldn't you just have it point to a relative directory instead of a fixed one? So instead of a file in the root directory pointing from "\ForgeNew" to "\ForgeNew\res\pics" it would instead point to "\..\pics". Then as long as the versions are installed side-by-side, things should be fine.

Don't know if anything still works like that or if its just command prompt melancholy. Also have no idea how it would work in a linux or mac setup.

[jendave]

Regarding where to place the "res" folder to make it easily editable for a user -
For Windows - in the same directory as the executable. e.g. C:\Program Files\forge\res. Most users know to look there.

For Linux - it depends. For ease of installation, most users will probably be comfortable with the res folder being inside the forge folder: ~/forge/res. The "true" Linux way would be the Forge executable would be located in /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin and the res folder would be in ~/.forge/res. That would require creation of Linux packages (deb, rpm etc.)

For Mac - The Forge.app should go into /Applications. The res folder should DEFINITELY not go into the Forge.app because that makes it essentially invisible to users. The res folder could be distributed along side the Forge.app folder. You would have a /Applications/Forge folder that includes both Forge.app and "Res". It could also go into /Library/Application Support/Forge folder instead.

[Rob Cashwalker]

On my Linux system, for simplicity, I just put ForgeSVN under my home folder.

On Windows Vista and 7, the Program Files\{ApplicationFolder} is not writable, any attempt to write to it gets redirected to the Users folder under Application Data. I still like to use INI files, and I prefer keeping them with the application, as opposed to the Windows folder, but Microsoft would rather I not do that....

[Chris H.]

I added a new section to the readme file that we include with the forge distributions. It may help.

Card Picture Issues:

The server which contained the high quality card pictures is now off line and these high quality card pictures are no longer available as a download from within the forge application. We apologize, but the current dev team do not maintain this server and this matter is out of our control.

Some people are choosing to re-download all of the low quality card and card set pictures when they install the next version of forge. This consumes large amounts of bandwidth needlessly.

The server containing the set pictures is limited to 30 gigs per month. At the current rate the server will hit the maximum of 30 gigs per month long before we reach the end of the month. Please be careful!

When you install the new version of forge find the forge/res/pics/ folder. Either move it or copy and paste the pics folder over to the recently installed new version of forge. This way you will only have to download the pictures for the new cards.

This should save enough bandwidth that everyone will be able to download the new set pictures from the cardforge server. We do appreciate your efforts to save bandwidth.