What File Sharing Sites Do You Like/Dislike, and Why?

[cybel]

User experience with various file sharing sites varies greatly depending on whether you have an account there or not.

For example, I used to use Sendspace and liked it just fine. Then I stopped paying for an account, and what a difference! The site became cluttered and confusing, downloads take forever, and worst of all, only one concurrent download is allowed at a time. Ouch!

Megaupload used to be annoying what with the download delay wait, though I was able to cut the delay in half by signing up for a free account. Having became a premium member, though, which I did because they have a permanent account for $200--pricey initially, but it's FOREVER!--I don't even have to see the download page anymore because I've initiated automatic downloads: click on an MU link and the download starts on its own. Nice! Also nice is that they offer a download counter so you have an idea of the traffic your files are generating. On the downside, their tools only work on PCs, not Macs, so uploads are pretty slow.

What is your experience?

Comments

[helens78]

As long as I can get to the files without a huge amount of trouble (no popup ads, etc) I don't mind using whatever (in order to download), but my combination of laziness in signing up for services and desire to use whatever works and is simplest for me has led to my using a public folder from Dropbox for sharing podfic files. I've never heard anyone say it's hard to get ahold of the files that way, so it's been working out fine so far! I've also got a lot of web space with no bandwidth limit, so I'm frequently tempted to just shove everything there, but that requires using an FTP client, whereas with Dropbox I can do everything from my desktop. :) But having a download counter would be awfully nice.

[cybel]

Yeah, back when I was using Sendspace for my podbooks, before I started uploading directly to the Archive, I really loved having download stats.

[sophinisba]

Did you see susan_voight's recent post at podfic_tips? She uses Google's URL shortener to get stats her Dropbox files. I recently started using box.net (free account) in order to be able to embed the streaming links and having download notifications has been a nice bonus.

[helens78]

Ooh, I will look into that! Thanks!

[dodificus]

Yeah, megaupload takes aaages to upload files. I can't believe they don't have any tools for Mac users:( But I do love my permanent account though<3

[cybel]

Our accounts can make out and have babies!

Yeah, the upload rate sucks, but since I don't have major lots of files to upload that's okay. I'll stay on the lookout for some way to improve this, though.

[dodificus]

You're such a sicko.

I'm going to go email you now (not for talk about what our future babies will look like) so that I can let you know what I'm planning to record for remopodmo and you can start working on a cover! You seem to have a lot of time on your hands for some reason.

*cracks the whip*

[cybel]

:P

Our babies would be beautiful and brilliant, if more than a bit snarky and weird.

[paxpinnae]

I don't really have a download site preference, BUT I would like to share a Firefox add-on that has made my downloading experience immeasurably easier: SkipScreen. Basically, if you go to a site that it recognizes (MegaUpload, Rapidshare, MediaFire, zShare, SendSpace, DepositFiles, and a couple others I've never seen used in fannish spaces), it waits through all the timers and clicks through all the screens for you. You don't even have to stay in the same window/tab; as long as you keep using Mozilla, the "Save File As" window will pop up when Skipscreen's done running. (You don't even necessarily have to do that; I've switched over to other programs and forgotten that I was about to download something; when I eventually switched back, the link was still good, and the file was actually-half downloaded.) So yeah, SkipScreen is awesome.

[cybel]

Thanks! I'll give this a try. Luckily, it seems to have been updated for the latest Firefox. A lot of other add-ons have been breaking with their crazy frequent Firefox updates.

[helens78]

Oh, that sounds wonderful! I'll give it a shot, thanks!

[sophinisba]

Neat, thank you!