[berayiwu5]

Originally Posted by berayiwu5

Thanks, AndrewD. Your support has been nothing but phenomenal.

In the "LDM Usage and Quotas" section of the wiki manual (http://www.eirma.org/wikis/index.php...age_and_Quotas), there is a passage that says:

"Limits can be placed on the number of files a user can access and/or the bytes that she can download in a 24 hour period, or both. If both types of limit apply, the first limit to be hit triggers the block. These limits apply individually to registered users, and collectively for unregistered users. Different limits can apply to each usergroup."

What does applying "collectively for unregistered users" mean? Does it mean that if I assign 200MB daily bandwidth allowance to unregistered users, I can have either 20 users using 10MB per day or 40 users using 5MB per day? If a couple of unregistered users have used up 150MB on a given day, does it mean that there wouldn't be much bandwidth left for other unregistered users to use?

Besides, I don't understand how file limits can be meaningfully set collectively for the group of unregistered users, since there is no telling how many unregistered users will visit a site on any given day.

Thanks for your pointers.

Originally Posted by AndrewD

The manual is out of date on this point, thanks for highlighting that. For unregistered users, the test is now made using their IP address. If you turn on bandwidth limits and set a limit for unregistered users, each IP address will be allowed the speofied number of files/bytes per day. It's not perfect, but it seems better than giving the whole world a limit that one person could use up.

Actually, AndrewD, the idea of giving unregistered users collectively an X amount of bandwidth usage everyday makes perfect sense to me. I was only asking a clarificatory kind of question. I didn't mean to say that I didn't like this feature. In the newer versions, i.e., for vBulletin 3.6, have you really changed this bandwidth quota to apply to unregistered users individually? If you have, then we could have server bandwidth maxed out quickly should a larger number of unregistered users visit our site:

Suppose we have purchased 50 GB monthly bandwidth, and we only expect about 50 unregistered users using about 20 MB per day. That would come down to 1 GB per day and 30GB per month. That's still within the limit of the quota. But if all of a sudden, we have 200 of these visitors, then the bandwidth usage will shoot up to 4GB per day, and we will use up our monthly bandwidth in two weeks.

I think you should keep collective bandwidth usage for unregistered users intact because of this kind of unpredictability. For registered users, bandwidth usage is more predictable. I would greatly appreciate it if you could reinstate this feature. But for file opening, I agree with you that it should be applied individually to each IP, registered or unregistered. Thank you. Please reconsider.