Download link becomes invalid mid-download!

[buckoa51]

I use E-junkie to sell training courses. My downloads are typically quite large (1245 mb in this instance) and are hosted on my external Amazon S3 account. A customer bought one of my downloads and e-mailed me to say it was taking a very long time to download. I suggested they use the Free Download Manager and simply leave it overnight to which they agreed.



However, when they returned in the morning the download had stopped after 6 hours and now said "invalid username and password". Checking in my e-junkie logs it said that the customer had made only one download attempt. Customer agreed to try again and the download did the same thing after about 6 hours. At this point I had to refund the customer and lose the sale.



Why is this happening and how can it be fixed please?

[E-junkie_Guru]

Hm, I'm not seeing any Refunded transactions for you since late June, so I'm not sure which order this pertains to. Did you use the Refund function in your payment processor account, or just send the buyer a separate payment equivalent to what they'd paid you? If you could email support with the Transaction ID of the affected order and tell us which product it was for, we'd be glad to investigate further:

https://www.e-junkie.com/ej/contact.php



This help page covers the typical causes of slow/stalled downloads:

http://www.e-junkie.com/ej/trouble.downloads.slow-stalled.htm



Bear in mind that buyers would never download directly from your remote storage; they always download from our servers, even for remotely-hosted files, as this allows us to cloak your remote file URLs and enforce your link expiration settings. If you're not familiar with the details of how our Remotely Hosted Downloads feature works, you may find it helpful to get a fuller understanding of the process:

http://www.e-junkie.com/ej/help.file-downloads.htm#remote



We particularly recommend buyers should only ever use the standard download manager built into their browser, and avoid using any third-party download manager or accelerator software. In particular, download accelerators which work by splitting the download into several parts to be downloaded simultaneously (as Free Download Manager does) can be problematic, as each part counts as a separate Attempt on the buyer's download link, so if it tries to download more parts than the number of Attempts you permit for the product, that can instantly expire the link, so only some of the parts may get downloaded, or the software may be unable to automatically Resume a download it detects as stalled (as Resuming also counts as another Attempt).



Note that reactivating an expired download link just resets its expiration countdown, so if you did that and then viewed the buyer's download stats in your Transaction Log, you would only see the number of Attempts made since the link was last reactivated, not cumulative download Attempts made since the link was first issued.

[buckoa51]

Hi,



Yes I simply refunded the transaction with Paypal, the transaction ID is 69H8261508405150G.



Okay, to be absolutely clear, the user was using Free Download Manager and the download got to around 50% after 6 hours and then came back with a "invalid username and password" error. At that point the customer contacted me and I checked my E-junkie logs, which stated that they had made ONE download attempt only.



After refunding the customer, I tried the download on my own internet connection with Free Download Manager, deliberately stopping it at 50% , there were no issues completing the download, but it took only 20 minutes for me.



"We particularly recommend buyers should only ever use the standard download manager built into their browser"



That's completely impractical for large downloads. Customers get 70% through a download and their internet hiccups, without a download manager they are starting from scratch again, not acceptable.



"so if it tries to download more parts than the number of Attempts you permit for the product, that can instantly expire the link"



That's what I thought might be happening but definitely not the case here.



"Note that reactivating an expired download link just resets its expiration countdown"



Yep, reactivated link after failed download, customer starts to download, gets 6 hours in and the download says "invalid username and password" and won't continue. E-junkie logs say "1 download attempt".



My theory is that the download took so long that E-junkie's download system simply timed out and that the access to your cache was then marked as invalid or something like that?

[E-junkie_Monster]

Hello,



We discussed this via email previously today but for anyone else who might be having difficulty with download links or reading this thread, it is not possible for a download link to time out or expire for any reasons other than the download attempts and time limit that are established within a product's settings.



We cannot recommend the use of download managers given that their very nature is likely to expire a link prematurely or because they can fail to connect or reconnect to an otherwise working download link.

[buckoa51]

You can't recommend download managers yet they are the only possible way that some customers can download bigger files. I mean if a file takes 3 hours to download and a customer is using a flakey wifi connection that disconnects on average every hour, how else other than using a download manager that supports resume can they possibly download the file?



Maybe rather than saying "we cannot recommend download mangers" and putting customers with slower connections into that impossible catch 22 situation you could choose just one or two to officially support?



"it is not possible for a download link to time out or expire for any reasons other than the download attempts and time limit that are established within a product's settings."



Ok just humor me on this for a moment. When a customer buys a download, you send them an e-mail that contains a link, we'll call this link 1. All link 1 does is send the customer to a page, where there is link 2. The customer clicks link 2, which calls some javascript and PHP code which must do the following:-



1) Log the download attempt

2) provide a URL to the browser / download manager to the actual content on Amazon S3 - we'll call this link 3.



Now, link 3 /must/ be some kind of time limited/protected link, otherwise I could simply inspect the code that link 2 is running and pluck out the URL and have access to the content on your Amazon account for ever more and share it with all my friends etc. I think what's happening in the case of Free Download Manager is that because it splits the download in two, by the time it comes to get the second part, link 3 has expired. A workaround for this would be to tell Free Download Manager to download in one part only and that's what I'll try next time.

[E-junkie_Guru]

It's not so much a matter of supporting any particular download managers, but rather simply an inherent technical limitation of the HTTP protocol that it's only possible to track the number of Attempts (hits) on each download URL and the Hours since the download link was issued (or last re-activated); the way download managers inherently operate, every part of a multi-part segmented download and every attempt to resume a paused/stalled download each count as a hit (Attempt) on the download URL.



Since it's impossible to tell whether any Attempt resulted in a complete, valid, openable file, and since users can share or copy any file on their computer after it's been downloaded only once (without having to "download another copy"), the Attempts setting is only useful to determine when the link expires, not how many "copies" of the file the buyer can download or possess. This help page covers this subject in more detail:

http://www.e-junkie.com/ej/faq.download-copies.htm



Your products' link expiration settings can allow up to 9 Attempts at maximum, which would probably be best if your file is extremely large and you expect many buyers with slow/flaky connections to have trouble downloading it. You can also set a limit in Hours that would expire the link at that time regardless of whether all Attempts have been used.



For extremely huge files (certainly those in the GB size range), you may wish to consider integration with a disc-fulfillment service that can duplicate and mail out a CD/DVD to buyers on-demand whenever an order comes in:

http://www.e-junkie.com/ej/tips.integration.cd-dvd.htm



We also integrate with the Continuata download management service which provides more robust functionality to pause, resume and provide multi-file/-part downloads:

http://www.e-junkie.com/ej/tips.integration.continuata.htm

[robertcrawfordgo2top]

Please tell me what's the difference between download films from opera,firefox,chrome and torrent?? Why people need to download from torrent??

[E-junkie_Guru]

We only deliver Web-based downloads, where we provide a link that buyers can use to obtain their download using a Web browser app such as Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari, etc., so BitTorrent-based downloads would be irrelevant to our service.

BitTorrent is an Internet file-sharing protocol entirely separate from the Web. It's primarily used for open sharing of extremely large files without any one person having to pay for serving it from a central server. Rather, anyone with a BitTorrent app who already has a copy of the file can choose to share it, and anyone who wants a copy of the file can obtain it with their BitTorrent app, which downloads small chunks of the file from everyone who's sharing their copy via BitTorrent. Thus, it's unsuitable for selling downloads where you only want paying buyers to have access to the file.