Ignoring download limits for paid files

[Makoto]

On communities that make use of IP.Downloads and have both paid and free files, if a user purchases a paid file and has exceeded their download quota for that day, they will not see a download button appear.

If they go into their client area, then go to managed purchases and try and download the file that way, they will get an error stating they have exceeded their (daily/weekly/monthly) download limit.

This is not desirable.

There should, at the very least, be an option to allow paid files to ignore download limitations, so users who pay for files aren't forced to wait in order to download what they paid for.

[SJ77]

18 minutes ago, Makoto said:

On communities that make use of IP.Downloads and have both paid and free files, if a user purchases a paid file and has exceeded their download quota for that day, they will not see a download button appear.

If they go into their client area, then go to managed purchases and try and download the file that way, they will get an error stating they have exceeded their (daily/weekly/monthly) download limit.

This is not desirable.

There should, at the very least, be an option to allow paid files to ignore download limitations, so users who pay for files aren't forced to wait in order to download what they paid for.

[Makoto]

To provide a demonstration of just how serious of a usability issue this is, this is what the customer sees when they purchase something and they have exceeded their download limits.

They complete the transaction, they're sent back to the downloads page, and..

..nothing changes. To the end user, it's like they never paid at all. This leads to some users mistakenly purchasing the same file again, only to see the same thing. Nothing.

So a very big problem on communities that utilize both download limits for free files and offer paid resources.

[Makoto]

This is an extremely easy fix too.

can_download_paid_files.patch

Literally just return after performing checks on paid files if there are no exceptions.

I firmly believe that no sane person out there would want to try and enforce download limitations on paid files so I don't think development resources should be wasted on trying to make this an option, but even if they did, they should not be able to purchase files if they have exceeded their download quota in that case.

But again, why would you want that?

I don't believe anyone reasonable would. So I think this patch is fine.

I will submit a plugin that applies this patch to the marketplace shortly in the interim for those affected by it.

[SJ77]

Thank you!! I stopped using download limits for this reason. 

I wish free files had a site wide daily download limit But I digress

[Makoto]

Plugin patch submitted and awaiting approval. Hopefully this gets fixed soon so this isn't needed.

Free, of-course, because I'm not going to charge for a simple bugfix patch. Reviews/thanks/headpats/coffee's are appreciated if you want to show thanks though.
- https://ko-fi.com/makoto_dev

Also, as a small note while we're here, the fact that the download button is just hidden and this generic text is displayed after a member hits their download limits is also really non-user friendly:

It doesn't tell them why they aren't permitted to download the file.

[SJ77]

30 minutes ago, Makoto said:

It doesn't tell them why they aren't permitted to download the file.

Can this be improved by editing the language string in the ACP?

 

[Makoto]

3 minutes ago, SJ77 said:

Can this be improved by editing the language string in the ACP?

Yes. That's what I ended up doing.

However, this is the catch-all error string. So if a user doesn't have permission to download files in a category for other reasons, that's the message that is displayed.

However, there is a separate language string for guests, so if you just have download access blocked for guests you can safely change that to "You have exceeded your download limits" or whatever and it will still just prompt guests to login to download files.

(Essentially, yes, there is a language string, you can reasonably change it to whatever you want, but this should still be improved in core)

[Lindy]

This is already addressed in 4.4.3

[Makoto]

2 minutes ago, Lindy said:

This is already addressed in 4.4.3

Thanks for quickly addressing the issue then.

[Lindy]

FYI, it is an additional group setting "apply restrictions to paid files" 

[Makoto]

3 minutes ago, Lindy said:

FYI, it is an additional group setting "apply restrictions to paid files" 

Sounds good. I'm just hoping the setting does more than just leave the download button hidden when enabled.

[Lindy]

Quote

There should, at the very least, be an option to allow paid files to ignore download limitations, so users who pay for files aren't forced to wait in order to download what they paid for.

That's really what the change addressed. I would consider it a bug if you purchased something and can't download it. Others may not, so we added an option to bypass those restrictions for paid files. The change doesn't do much more than that at this point.

[Makoto]

FYI the above plugin was deleted since IPS probably doesn't want an already fixed issue in the next release posted as a patch here.

The above manual patch still works if you really need it for the current 4.4 release or 4.3.x and know how to apply it though.