I'd like to have a middle ground between the current behaviour of silent mode off and on. Call it "conservative" mode for lack of a better name. ("low distraction" mode might work).

(I first posted about this idea here. Starting a new thread for it.)

The purpose is to trade off sometimes waiting longer than needed to gain the benefit of having fewer captchas. Useful while you're doing something other than poke around in JD2, and don't want to get distracted into thinking about your downloads, or thinking how JD2 could have been smarter and not interrupted your movie or brought you running from another room with this useless captcha...

I know when I'm trying to get something useful done that I've been procrastinating about, the last thing I want is another excuse to go back to fiddling with my downloads. I'd certainly be willing to sacrifice some hoster utilization for reduced captchas.

This setting would affect plugins for hosters that need a captcha solve to find out how much wait time is actually remaining. Or hosters that don't have a way to find out, and the plugin just keeps trying to start a download over and over, until it works. (e.g. ul.to without the first option enabled (free-user experimental wait-time handling) will show a captcha every 5 minutes when using a free account.)

Plugins that support this setting would try to make a guess at how long they need to wait until a new download can be started. Plugins that can do it accurately and reliably (like the ul.to plugin, once the "experimental waittime handling" is no longer experimental) can leave this behaviour enabled all the time. Plugins that can only avoid captchas by sometimes waiting significantly longer than needed would only do that if the global conservative flag is set.

I never did much Java programming, but would it work to make a global "public static int org.jdownloader.conservativemode;" flag? (I'm pretty sure that's the wrong syntax, but Java's version of a global variable is what i mean). And make the silent-mode GUI checkbox a 3-state off/conservative/silent.

Obviously it would be a ton of work to implement this for every plugin that could benefit, but implementing it as a flag that plugins CAN but don't have to check would allow for gradual implementation. Plugins unaware of the new flag would behave exactly as before. Plugins like ul.to that already have options to enable experimental wait-time handling could act as if those were enabled when this flag is set.

If it proves popular, more plugins could have support added, if people can think of heuristics for a given hoster for guessing the right wait time with reasonable confidence. (Maybe a global option for conservative mode accuracy threshold (in minutes of expectation value of wasted download time) would work. Each plugin that supported the flag could either adjust its guesses, or disable guessing entirely if it couldn't achieve the minimum accuracy the user was willing to accept.

Other distraction-minimizers: delay operations that will require a captcha for up to N minutes, so they happen at the same time as another captcha is needed for something else. Solving a second captcha right away is minimally distracting. You already need to pause / rewind your movie / audiobook, pause your game, stop thinking about the code your were reading, or whatever.

Another idea: if a user lets a captcha timeout, but we're still within the time window when we're not sure another download should even be possible yet, don't mark the link as skip. Instead, set a 5 min timer until the next attempt on the same link. I know I've never found it useful to come back to JD2 to find a bunch of links marked as skip after I left it alone but forgot to set the "stop downloads but finish running ones" option. (All the hosters I have many links for require a captcha to start a download.)

Actually, maybe this behaviour shouldn't depend on whether or not we think a download from this hoster is highly likely to be startable or not.

I don't really want to make new threads for each of these last two ideas, unless anyone else likes them and thinks i should.

[raztoki]

When it comes to it there are very few hosters that show error handling after next captcha event, maybe one or two at most and it really doesn't warrant any restructure of core features to support said sites when it can be done within plugin source. For solving some of you other issues brought up in post, I would say most can be solved via other means for example CES, or silent mode and or Premium modes. If the user is free account or free non account they are either at the keyboard or they have CES (otherwise downloading only happens whilst they are at keyboard). Alternatively users using 'free modes' need to choose providers that do not have captcha, as that way downloads progress regardless. JD2 does have hasCaptcha and hasAutoCaptcha evaluations to determine which hoster gets used and these hosts can be preferred.

raztoki

[pspzockerscene]

Agree with raztoki
99,99% of all file hosts do not handle this in such a bad case so implementing it in the core is not worth it in my opinion.
Simply report all hosts for which you experience these problems and we'll fix it!

Also, even if we had a manual setting: You'd be the only one who has a benefit of it - what's with the millions of other users who want to use JD and have the best possible automated downloadflow (with default settings)?

Then about captchas & distraction:
As said before, you got multiple possibilities:
-Turn JD off
-Turn Captchas off
-Use a captcha solver service like for example 9ke.eu and let other people solve your captchas while you're either not there or you simply can't/don't want to solve captchas for other reasons!

Other than that - I'd consider your request declined
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• Offiziell wird deine Anfrage nicht vom JDownloader Entwickler Team umgesetzt.

Also wird meine Anfrage niemals umgesetzt?

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• JDownloader ist ein Open Source Projekt, was bedeutet, dass Du/Freunde/andere jederzeit eigenen Code beisteuern können. Falls die Allgemeinheit von diesem oder anderen selbst eingebauten Features profitieren würde, zögert nicht und schickt uns euren Code.
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GreeZ pspzockerscene

Ok. My original motivation for this request was the apparently unintended / buggy behaviour of the uploaded.to plugin with option #1 unchecked, spamming me with captchas every 5 minutes, even though you were telling me it was supposed to be finding the remaining wait time after one solve.

Also, I like to keep things simple, and ease in to having JD2 automate more and more of the downloading process. I didn't want to jump into finding out about captcha-solving web sites right away. That does sound like the way to go, though, if I can sit and solve captchas for a few minutes to get enough credits to last me for a day or so of overnight downloads.

Still, the fewer captchas JD2 shows, the fewer credits it uses up on a captcha-exchange site.

Also, if I wanted to pay money for the stuff I'm downloading, I'd pay the people that own the copyright to the content I want, not the hosters profitting from people sharing files. (I'm pretty sure most of the stuff people want to download from file hosters is of questionable legality at best. That's why I'm not using my real name on this forum.) This whole making money off of redistributing for-pay content is a bit too sketchy for my taste. I don't mind getting what I can for free, though, while the getting is good, along side p2p filesharing.

Anyway, I didn't know how many hosters this was an issue for. If there isn't anything interesting to do as far as trading off lower utilization for fewer captchas on most hosters, then yeah it's prob. not worth implementing a global option.

[pspzockerscene]

We'll get that uploaded thing fixed
As said before, at least with the options enabled it is SUPPOSED to work and of course another thought behind that is that people are using captcha solver services and they do not want to waste their credits - I mean even if they're not using such services, entering captchas for nothing is unnerving.

About the copyright stuff:
I'm not sure what you're talking about but I guess our forum is not the right place for such discussions.
So far we (well, the AppWork company behind JD) already felt the full force of the german law once (keywords 'rtmpe protocol') without having to do anything with the actual distribution copyrighted stuff so before something like this happens again lets better not talk about it at all.
I'll close this thread now - if you got something you want to add to your post here, just PM me and I'll edit it

GreeZ psp