Choul wrote:Is it possible to allow a global enable instead of disable? So you only set in to 'on' when you want this option?
I prefer opt-out. I don't know the statistic off the top of my head but the idea is that if a feature is off by default, it might as well not exist to some huge percentage of the user base. Basically only you forum people would know to turn it on. And judging by the five or ten people that post here each day vs. the 3000 downloads each day, I'm guessing it'd be a pretty large percentage that wouldn't know it existed.
There are way fewer paranoid people (and they'll know to look for it) than people who are going to enjoy the extra functionality. A version check is pretty trivial. I'm guessing people will be a lot more excited about online scoreboards.
TieDyeGuy wrote:Honestly, I will trust Synthesia...
Yeah, I know the concern with software in general is a very real one. That's why I was already planning a disable. You guys hopefully know me well enough to know that (outside of wacky bugs that will probably happen in some development version
) I won't be doing anything egregious with your bandwidth or whatever.
Regarding the type of data that is sent, I don't really have anything of yours that is valuable. When forum passwords start going across the wire, they'll be encrypted. I guess I'm not like, scanning your drive and collecting identifying information. I did just start including a privacy policy with the distribution (the installer will have you click past that in addition to the license), but it doesn't say anything different than any other privacy policy.
My question was more specific to TonE: "Why would you want to disable [Synthesia's] online abilities?" given that I'd imagine he (hopefully) has a trust level similar to your own.
To be a little more specific about what "periodically checks for new versions" means, Synthesia will fire off a request to the site (total size of the request/response
including http headers should be less than 1kB) once at program start... only if it has been at least 3 days since the last check.
I actually have to be way more sensitive about bandwidth because of the website's load than I do because of you guys.
If I'm not extremely careful about how much stuff is sent back and forth, I'll hit my bandwidth cap almost immediately. The site+forum+downloads right now reaches about 25% of my limit each month. Offloading the front-page video to YouTube helped that quite a bit (I was around 40%).
Now, the good news is, the type of requests the game will be making are all incredibly small and result in simple text responses. It will take something like 100 scoreboard page requests to equal the bandwidth cost of loading this forum page.