Balls of Steel finally rewritten

Hey all,

Sorry for the last few weeks of downtime on the site, but I had to
migrate the data to a new server, and let's just say that all those
gigs of scans don't move across slow network connections in a timely
manner. ;)

In any case, the site is back up, and it's got a nice new face too.
I'll be adding a bunch more miscellaneous features (and bringing back
the "show off your game room" feature) in the coming weeks/months.

For those of you who might not be aware, http://www.ballsofsteel.net
is a web site where you can view scans of many different pinball
plastics and parts.

Finally, I'll go ahead and get the flame war started. I have made the
decision to implement CAPTCHA when you download a scan. This is one of
those "type in the words in this image" type things. Once I have user
accounts back online, it won't prompt you if you're logged in, I don't
think.

I'm having to implement this due to the insane amounts of bandwidth
I've seen eaten up by "web site mirroring tools" that people point at
the site in order to scarf down the entire site. Gluttony, I guess,
but it's not cheap to pay for all that bandwidth.

So the short version is I wanted a way to continue to allow legitimate
traffic as well as cut down on the snarfing. This is what I came up
with. If you have better ideas, feel free to shoot me a line.

I'm using the reCAPTCHA system, which uses your input to verify you,
but also transcribe old books into digital form.

So that's it. Enjoy the site, and flame away. ;)

Chris
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Balls of Steel finally rewritten
    ... I'll go ahead and get the flame war started. ... I'm having to implement this due to the insane amounts of bandwidth ... I've seen eaten up by "web site mirroring tools" that people point at ... What happened to the South Park Mr. Hankey plastic I sent you? ...
    (rec.games.pinball)
  • Multiple web sites bandwidth utilization
    ... Last week we´ve been surprised by a single web site consuming almost 17 Mbps ... of our 60Mbps internet bandwidth. ... To avoid this kind of surprise, we´ve enabled bandwidth trottling for every ... individual web site bandwidth utilization. ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.server.general)
  • Multiple web sites bandwidth utilization
    ... Last week we´ve been surprised by a single web site consuming almost 17 Mbps ... of our 60Mbps internet bandwidth. ... To avoid this kind of surprise, we´ve enabled bandwidth trottling for every ... individual web site bandwidth utilization. ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.server.networking)
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