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This message has been sent out today to a number of regular and Premium account holders.

Dear user,

If you are receiving this message it means that your address was used on ravishare.com to register an username whose files or activities have been recently flagged for one or more of the following reasons:

- unreasonably high number of DMCA notices, pointing out that you are uploading copyright material knowingly
- unusual number of uploads that are never downloaded by anyone
- abuse of the servers through misconfigured mass downloaders or plain DDoS attacks
- unusual number of fake downloads (incomplete downloads, downloads without referrer, downloads with fake referrer)
- repeated downloads of the same file from the very same IP address over a short period of time
- abuse of the Rapidshare leeching function or Remote Upload, and/or other Premium privileges.

As per our Terms of Service, we are committed to take any measures to protect the integrity of the service and preserve the user experience for regular users, who are not interested in anything else but filesharing. As part of this, we have put in place an automated script that checks all ravishare.com accounts automatically and can trigger one or several of the following conditions without warning:

- temporarily limit the account
- remove files from the servers
- cancel payments if points were awarded for incomplete downloads, fake or missing referrer information
- disable Premium membership if acquired through fake Paypal payments or by converting undeserved points
- permanently remove the account
- permanently ban the IP address.

If your account has been limited or disabled recently, it is very likely it was part of the weekly sweep. This message is sent to all affected accounts only once. No individual inquiries will be followed and there will be no appeal, since the entire process is automated. We reserve the right to change the rules of the security script as we see fit in the future. You are advised to use other services for your needs if ravishare.com is not answering your requirements.


There is also a new version of the script in trials, that we hope to deploy soon in production. As you have seen above, security measures and preventing abuse have been the main drivers behind it, although we are bringing in several new features and better overall integration with other services.

Thank you for your support.

Mark Spades

This is not pleasant, so I will get straight to business.

A good number of accounts were banned today. We have been monitoring certain patterns of behavior for over 3 months now, and the culprits were always about the same. They had their fair share of warning. Some had their payments delayed, blocked and even canceled last month. I wish I could say there is a way to deal with this problem that would keep everyone happy, but we don't see it.

This service is free for you to discover and test its benefits. It has certain Premium features, to which you can get access for a fee we deem enough to keep running it. Most of its costs are covered from advertising - the links you see on the homepage and the paid surveys that unlock the downloads for anonymous and registered users.

If your only reason for using this website is to abuse it, in conjunction with other similar services running on the same platform, don't be surprised that you are not welcome. Go try this with any other business and they will tell you the same.

On the other hand, if your files are not attracting visitors interested in answering the offers or buying Premium accounts, we don't want them. It's not a remote backup service, and it is not an unlimited resource to be used and abused until it turns in a steady stream of revenue for a smart few. Blackhat techniques are not allowed, and people trying repeatedly to break the rules are not either.

A last warning - if you received the link to this News entry as an answer to an inquiry on your ban, here it is - we consider your business bad and you are invited to cease or take it somewhere else.
IP addresses have been logged, and if you try to open new accounts and we catch you again, they will be banned. No false leads will ever be paid, nor will we let you abuse our service or other companies'.

This topic is closed - for any questions please read the Terms of service again.

Mark Spades
Owner of RaviShare

Hello, all!

Just another quick note on the new rule in place to prevent abuse: files uploaded on our servers that have no downloads for 5 days will be automatically removed.

We have a few heavy uploaders that use intensely the Remote Upload and the Rapidshare leech functions to upload hundreds of files just to test what their referrals are interested in. This takes from the resources available to other users and does not serve the purpose of our website. If you want to use RaviShare to store your files, buy a Premium account.

This rule is only temporary, but will remain in place as long as required to tame such excessive behavior. I strongly advise those affected to comply and avoid escalating the issue, as the next measure will be definitive ban of the accounts without warning.

I hope this has been clear enough - please approach your Account Manager if you have any specific questions.

Mark S.

Hello from the filehosting boffins!

We are delighted to announce that our service will undergo a major upgrade in the following weeks.

There are several features we are already experimenting with - maybe our Premium users noticed the possibility of previewing DivX files directly from the site already, and there are important upgrades planned for the interface, the download points system and payment methods.

Just like we did on previous occasions, we will announce on our Twitter account @ravishare as soon as the service is stopped and once it resumes normal operation. For any concerns during the planned outage please do not hesitate to e-mail us at contact(a)ravishare.com.

Thank you for your support.

The RaviShare Team

Hello, everybody!

We hope you are having fun using our website. It is the end of another month and payments are leaving your way very soon.

As a quick note on how download points are counted - we said it before in one to one conversations and I will state it here once more: if you cannot provide a good explanation on the lack of referrals for your downloads, they will not be taken into account.

Users who request and insist on payment for fake downloads will be banned. If you are running a large account, please talk to your account manager directly for more details.

Oliver, RaviShare tech support

Stepping in just to let you know one of the fileservers is undergoing an OS upgrade and will not be available for a while.

New uploads to this server are temporarily disabled. Existing links pointing to files on it will not work, potentially returning 404 errors.

There is no risk of losing data and the whole process should end shortly. We will keep you updated once we have news.

Oliver, RaviShare tech support

This is just a minor addition to RaviShare - now you can follow public uploads by subscribing to the RSS feed. The link for the catalogue feed is placed between the Uploader and Contact Us links on the lower right of every page.

Please try it and let us know what you think.

Mark S.

Just a quick update for those of you who did not take part in our early Rapidshare Leech trial.
We are currently testing an amazing feature on RaviShare - registered and Premium users are allowed to download files from Rapidshare without download delay (similar to Rapidshare Premium account privileges). For now there is a quota of 10 and respectively 25 downloads / day for each registered / Premium account.

We hope you will enjoy it and we are looking forward to your feedback.

Best regards,
Mark S.

We are currently testing a different player for our preview feature - this one allows .mp3 and .flv files to be pseudo-streamed directly from the website.

Ravishare is not a video-sharing platform like Youtube, so there will be no server-side encoding in the near future. Only .flv and .mp3 files can be previewed online, and the player configuration is limited to the minimum for now.

In order to preserve bandwidth, unregistered users have direct access only to the first 30s in preview, after which they are required to register or fill in a survey as a temporary measure.

Once again, just like we asked in the beginning, please refrain from sharing files for which you do not own the intellectual rights. They will be taken offline once reported and the account banned without reimbursement in the case of Premium users.

Thank you for your support and interest in our service.

The RaviShare Team

The scrubbing of downloads was completed by 22H00 GMT and the mass payment file uploaded to PayPal. Special request payouts have been done using Moneybookers.

Some users claimed their Premium Points in time, but did not confirm their PayPal address. We have e-mailed everyone in this situation and their well-deserved payments will be honored upon confirmation. Because of this we cannot announce yet the total sum of payouts, but we can tell it's a four-digit number. Well done, everybody!

The learnings from this opening campaign will be used to improve the Premium Points system. Some of the limitations will be lifted, and we hope you will welcome the changes.

Once again, many thanks for your interest and continous support!

The RaviShare Team

We will begin scrubbing the downloads today and continue tomorrow.
Those who registered Paypal accounts will receive their commissions there. Alternatively you can notify us by using the contact form and send in your Moneybookers account.
A new point conversion system will start on 01/07/2009. We have received requests from some of the most active RaviShare users to relax the files/size/downloads limits and you will see a new value of the point in action. The affiliate links have also been very successful, with some users bringing over 30 new registrations under their accounts.
Unconverted points following this change will not be changed at the new value.

The other rules will stay - full downloads only (no previews), one download/file/IP and banning of all accounts found in breach of the rules.

Thank you for your support!

The RaviShare Team

Update 23/06/2009

The server returned to normal performance levels. We blame the slow response on the large number of downloads (over 40 simultaneously) of the same file from IPs located in Asia. Some of the learnings taken from this incident will be used to shape the future versions of our service.

Thank you for your interest and patience during the incident.


Original Message

One of our fileservers, located in New York, is extremely slow.
A ticket has been raised with the service provider managing it.
While the issue is being looked into we have stoped uploads to that particular server. Downloads from various parts of the world are reportedly slow (128-160kbps), but the server remains online and responding.

We will return with updates once available.

The RaviShare Team

Update 23:00 GMT+1 18/06/2009

The transfer to the new server is complete. There are still an impressive number of parameters to adjust, as well as in-depth testing to be performed before we conclude the migration.
Some Internet providers might cache DNS entries and still direct their clients to the old installation. These records might take 24-48H to update..

Once again many thanks for your patience and support.

Original Message:
The migration of www.ravishare.com to a new server will start soon. All the file servers will remain in place, and the uploads that need to be copied over represent less than 5% of the files currently available for download.

The direct links active while we take the last snapshot might expire in more than 6H (their current life span). If your downloads are affected by this, please generate the links again and let us know if the download cannot be resumed.

We plan to initiate DNS propagation of the new records later tonight (18-06-2009) and have everything back in place before the weekend. As always please follow ravishare on Twitter for important updates.

The RaviShare Team

Probably unrelated with the latest updates, the load on our servers has increased continously for the past two days.

Our present setup is more than able to provide the bandwidth and diskspace required, yet we are concerned about the host serving the main interface (the frontend of ravishare.com). The scripting done in the background is quite CPU-intensive, and written with reliability in mind, rather than performance. The number of connections to the MySQL database is also insufficient sometimes, causing temporary breakdowns in the service.

Over the next week we will be brainstorming for solutions, especially the growth-friendly type. The last thing we want is a service down every other day either by upgrades or overload. If you notice things are not going smoothly, please be patient and consider trying again after a little while. We are aware of the problem and working to its resolution.

Thank you for your interest and continous support.

Mark Spades

Over the last 24H we have noticed a large number of files that violate the copyright of their respective owners. The users responsible for this have been notified through e-mail and given an 1H ultimatum to remove the files themselves.

Ravishare is not a host of warez or any other copyright-infringing material. Failure to comply with our terms will lead to termination of your account and all the necessary legal proceedings.

The RaviShare Team

The update to the latest version of the website was completed, but not without surprises and unexpected delays.

The folder system is now available to users; the same goes for the remote upload function. The catalog has been revamped and given advanced search features.

We did not neglect the social network aspect either - the upload results page has been slightly changed to improve usability and provide a more intuitive layout for the anonymous Twitter feature.

Users can now advertise a referral/affiliate link and get points for each new registered account open. Some bonuses were converted to money and paid via Moneybookers during the same period of time. That speaks a lot about unfortunate timing.

Most of the changes happened in the background - the core logic and the administration interface were the main target of this upgrade.

Overall we hope the downtime did not affect anyone too seriously. We learned a lot, and hopefully upgrades will go smoothly next time.

Due to the distributed nature of our service, we are still monitoring everything closely. Please do not hesitate to contact us for any questions or concerns.

Many thanks for your support and patience,

The RaviShare Team

Update 10th of June, 2009
The main server is working again with the new version of the script. Currently we are experiencing problems with one of the file servers, but these will be solved soon.

Thank you for you support.

Mark S.

-------------------------------------------------------------------

Update
We are experiencing some difficulties with the upgrade and probably a delay of several hours before returning to normal operations.
One of our scripting experts is working on the issue, which currently relates to the handling of sessions by the new version.

This News entry will continue to be updated as we make progress.

Many thanks for your patience.

Mark Spades

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Original Entry:

We are currently testing a new version of our website. Lots of efforts go into limiting the downtime and keeping all the files/users untouched while we implement it in production.

The first stage will begin around 15H00 GMT on 09/06/2009, when all new uploads will be suspended. Downloads will still be available from all servers.

The second stage will probably start from 17H00 GMT, when downloads will stop working as well or work erratically.

From 19H00 GMT we will start to bring back the different servers one by one. If all goes well, we expect to resume normal operations from 21H00 GMT onwards. If your download link is not working in this interval, it might be because that particular server has not been updated yet.
Please be patient and let us know of any problems encountered with the system after 21H00 and we will do our best to fix it as soon as possible.

In the unlikely event that we might experience data loss, please keep a copy of your files offline. Only paid Premium Account users will benefit from a separate backup for their files.

This message was also sent to all registered users via e-mail.
Thank you for your understanding.

The RaviShare Team

We were absolutely delighted to see that Mani Karthik, the "Internet Enthusiast" behind the SEO blog mentioned in the title discovered and commented positively our service. Thank you, Mani - and the same goes to all using our website, mentioning it to friends and providing us with feedback.

Best regards,
The RaviShare Team

If you are familiar with filehosting providers you have already noticed that uploading multiple files at the same time is not exactly everybody's cup of tea.

The feature has been present on ravishare.com from day one for registered and premium users. Since we added a new server to our farm, we decided to allow even unregistered* visitors to use it - so now you can upload up to three files from the home page without logging on - it takes you exactly 10 clicks (we tried, assuming the Browse button opens directly the source folder on your computer).

Registered users can upload up to five files at a time, and premium users an whooping eight.

Happy sharing!
The RaviShare Team



*The unregistered access to multi-uploads might be retired at any time

We have received questions about ravishare.com, especially on the integration with Twitter. Instead of answering every individual e-mail, Mark put together a second video - this time a walkthrough of sending the link to an uploaded file via Twitter. You can find it here.

There was also a minor improvement to the "Tweet This" function - now you can enter multiple Twitter names in the textbox and Ravishare will announce every recipient individually about your upload with an @-reply from @ravishare. Test it and let us know what you think.

Best regards,
The RaviShare Team