Today we upgraded the bandwidth available on two of our fileservers - the process was not under our direct control and caused service availability to drop for several hours, depending on the server you would have tried to access during the reconfiguring of the network.

We apologize for any inconvenience caused, but remain confident this is only going to improve the overall quality of our service and have no negative impact on your ongoing experience with ravishare.com.

Thank you for your patience and helpful feedback, as always it was much appreciated!

Mark, Operations Manager

Many of you probably noticed that our Torrent leeching feature is still in testing beta stages. Based on your recent feedback we were able to fix an error in the Torrent modules which had the potential to disable it on that respective server when a set of conditions were met.
As of today we are monitoring for any new occurrences and feel confident you will experience a more reliable service from Ravishare.com.

Many thanks for your continuous feedback and support!

Mark, on behalf of the RaviShare.com team

Some of our users experienced difficulties registering with an Yahoo e-mail address. We had a clear, traceable message today (thank you, Andre!) and were able to investigate the problem in more detail.

If you registered using an Yahoo address and did not receive a confirmation e-mail shortly after (10-15 minutes the most, and check the SPAM folder as well) or the message arrived truncated/unreadable, please send us a message using the contact form and do not forget to include the e-mail address used for registration. We will be able to find your pending account and approve it, generally in less than 24H.

You also have the option of trying once more with another address. We do not send unsolicited e-mails or share the registration details with any third parties.

Until we find a more permanent solution, please accept our apologies for the inconvenience and do not hesitate to send complaints to Yahoo requesting them to prioritize messages from our server.

Mark S.

*** UPDATE 09H45 ***

We are done with the fileserver hardware upgrade. The goal was to upgrade the memory to 8GB and clean any dust deposits from the fan blades and coolers.

If you notice anything unusual, please let us know.

*** UPDATE 08H00 ***

The planned maintenance update window started.
If you are missing one or more files from your account, please allow a little over one hour before attempting to upload again.

We will return with more details later.


*** ORIGINAL MESSAGE ***

Just a quick heads-up note, everybody!

Within the next hour (00H00 GMT) our datacentre team will need to do some emergency maintenance on one of their core routers in order to provide their customers with more redundant services.
This maintenance upgrade is required and some users may experience a temporary network outage of between 10 - 20 minutes. During this interval the homepage will be inaccessible, but ongoing downloads and uploads will continue undisturbed.

We do apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.


The RaviShare team is also upgrading one of the fileservers (planned for 20-04-2010, around 08H00 GMT), so do not be surprised if some of your torrents do not show up or certain files are not available for about one hour or so.

This fileserver downtime is planned and will not affect the main website. We will update our Twitter account if we encounter any problems.

Thank you for your support!

Oliver

We are learning interesting things from our ongoing polls. Among other suggestions, that some of our users would like to test the Premium features before committing to a purchase.

So far we have done this with free coupon codes for 3, 7 and even 30 days. We will continue to do it, especially on our Twitter account - so make sure you follow us.

Today we introduced a new feature - our Registered users can now gather points from surveys and trial offers. Before commenting and complaining, please note we offer this as an ALTERNATIVE. We are not blocking downloads with surveys and overall have tried to keep the website free of animated banners and the more intrusive forms of online advertisement.

You can head over to the FREE Points page and give it a try. Maybe those few hundreds of points you were missing for another week of Premium access are only minutes away.

Please remember we offer this feature as is and without any warranty. Use it on your own risk, but do not hesitate to send us your feedback about it.

Have a nice weekend!

Mark Spades

Just a quick note to let you know we are limiting drastically the number of uploads / day for registered (free) users. The access to the feature is meant to help you test the website, but we have seen various forms of abuse and we want to prevent the situation from becoming unmanageable.

Premium quotas will also be adjusted - paying users will receive an extension to their remaining subscription to compensate for the reduced daily usage.

Also please note that if you cannot download any more files from another filehosting website on a particular day all you have to do is return 8-12h later and try again. We offer a generous daily quota to our Premium accounts, but limitations still apply due to large variations in file size.

As a final note we'd like to remind you we are operating mostly advertising-free and encourage you to get a Premium subscription if you find value in our services. We try to bring in more features, disk space and bandwidth, and wasting time in managing resources and policing users is keeping us from improving the service.

Do not hesitate to send us your feedback using the contact form.

Mark Spades

Dear All,

Thank you for your interest in our service.

At approximately 3:00PM Pacific time yesterday, as well as earlier in the same morning morning we experienced internet traffic problems related to Level 3 and their core routers.
This post makes official our announcements on Twitter of the initial outage that occurred and later confirmation that it appears that services are beginning to return to normal.

We will continue to monitor this situation throughout the day to ensure that things remain stable. As additional information is released we will update the community via twitter at http://www.twitter.com/ravishare and here as well.

Due to the distributed nature of our service, direct link downloads and remote uploads (Rapidshare, MegaUpload and torrents) were not affected. Our Operations Manager is investigating the posibility of manual failover to a different datacentre, were this to happen again.

We appreciate your understanding and thank you for being the most important part of RaviShare.

Oliver, on behalf of the RaviShare Team

Good morning, everyone!

I know it's Sunday and we should be more worried about spending time with our families and watching the game, but I couldn't stay put and not let you know of the latest development in our service:

Users can now remote upload URLs from MegaUpload.com straight to their accounts, without delays or any other limitations!

This is an important step in our quest to provide you with interoperability with other leading filehosting services present on the market today. The answers to the polls showed that MegaUpload.com was important to many of you, and we are starting a trial today, letting you leech up to 100 files / day from MegaUpload and Rapidshare (for Premium accounts).

All you have to do to avail of the MegaUpload and Rapidshare free URL leech is to register on the website and select Free URL leech in the Upload Files page, then paste your remote URL from any of these sites in the textbox and hit upload.

If you enter your Twitter account details in the My Account page our website will tweet the names of the files once they are available for download from your RaviShare account.

With this brief announcement we invite you to logon, test the new feature and provide us with your feedback via the Contact Us form.

Have a great Sunday!

Mark S.

*** UPDATE ***

Several users offered their help and it was much appreciated. In the meanwhile we put online the latest translation in Arabic and would like to invite you to test it and give us your opinion.

*** ORIGINAL MESSAGE ***

Assalamu alaikum!

We noticed that some of our visitors are speaking Arabic. This is one of the main reasons for integrating CashU as payment processor and providing an Arabic version of the interface. Unfortunately, we found that our translation is of poor quality. We regret the situation - but nobody in our team speaks Arabic and we had to do with an automated solution. The English and French versions are more reliable, but we did not find a solution for the Arabic one yet.

If you want to help the other users, use the form to contact us. Your assistance will be appreciated.

Thank you for your continuous support.

Mark Spades

One of our users in the Netherlands suggested we stop worrying which feature should we work to implement or improve next and start asking YOU what you think.

We listened and starting today I will be looking actively for your feedback on Twitter, monitor the polls we put in place and read your comments daily.

RaviShare.com is one year old now (and correspondingly noisy, some might say) and fully packed with some of the most advanced features available on the filehosting scene today - we leech, we tweet, we share and we are not complacent - let us have your feedback and we will put it to good use.

So please take a second to vote in our polls (there are a few in rotation, should keep you from getting bored), use the system, tell your friends about it and generally let us know what you think. The service could not come this far without you, and for this here's a big THANK YOU from our team - we will not disappoint you.

Mark, on behalf of the RaviShare team

We are in a celebrating mood and wanted to give something to our users - you can use the coupon code "3daysfree" without the quotes during registration to create a FREE Premium account valid for three days (limitations apply).

Thank you for your continuous support and happy sharing!

The RaviShare Team

We began testing some of the new features recently implemented on our website. Our favorite among these is definitely the Torrent Leeching option - Registered and Premium users might have already noticed a new source of content in Upload Files named Torrent leech. This allows you to upload torrent files to our servers (normally with extension .torrent) and let RaviShare handle them for you - download the files included in the torrents and adding them to your account.

This can prove extremely useful - you don't need to run a resource-intensive torrent client yourself, there are no special requirements in regards to opening ports in your firewall and you do not need to worry about download/upload ratios, seeding or anything else like that.

We invite you to try and test the new features and send us your suggestions - your feedback is extremely important to us. Please bear in mind that files uploaded from torrents must obey our Terms of service and are subject to the same treatment in case of DMCA notices. Using RaviShare to share copyrighted files is not allowed and can lead to suspension of responsible accounts and cancellation of payment.

Thank you for your continuous support and happy sharing!

The RaviShare Team

Registered and Premium users can enter their Twitter details in the RaviShare account and have our website tweet automatically the latest uploads in their timeline.

We expect this to really boost your downloads - coupled with the URL Leech feature this should be more than enough to get you started as a RaviShare power user.

The original anonymous tweeting will also return soon - follow us on Twitter for updates.

Oliver

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.