An important message from Dan Carlin

Your work is excellent quality in both the informative and entertainment. And it's a good price too. I'm happy that you are clear on such things, as most would deflect or lie about this, or just stonewall you.

Cosmic Bananas

You do what you need to do, I'm just so humbled and honored that you share your knowledge, time, and research with little old me! I was wondering if you would ever consider doing an episode on the lead up to the Batavia shipwreck? I find that period of time both confusing and mesmerizing. Thank you for everything you do!

Luzah

Dan, I just wanted to say. I've listened to you for over 8 years and hundreds of hours on repeat. By far the best podcast I've ever listened to. Thank you for your hard work and dedication over these years. I bought the first 49 episodes a couple of years ago, so, thank you for the heads up. I downloaded all of them today. Looking forward to my canvass-wrapped art for the Celtic Holocaust and Blueprint for Armageddon. God bless and keep doing what you're doing brother.

brother, you already pay for patreon

Levi Rankins

I disagree. I’m very happy to own the content and don’t want to have to be subscribed in perpetuity to access it or toggle a subscription on and off whenever I want to go back to it

Michael

It’s oldest to newest. People who bought their episodes in 2012 are going to be immediately locked out of their downloads. You’re going to be fine for awhile. But you should still download and back up whatever you’ve purchased

Michael

Dan, please know I share this story with only love and respect for your work. So when I read your email I wondered, where did I put all those old recordings I downloaded? How ever will I find them in the rat nest of files that is my long suffering hard drive. But then the answer hit me like a bolt out of the blue - what are the largest mp3s anywhere on the drive? Yup, they all popped right out, 'Blueprint for Armageddon', 'Ghosts of the Ostfront'. Whew.

Richard Sawey

Yeah, as a software developer, I must concur. I mean, it's just an n-to-n relationship between two tables in a database, and we already know the upper limit for one (the number of episodes), and can make an educated guess of the order of magnitude for the other (number of customers). Not that much data at all, unless your database design is criminally incompetent. I'd feel comfortable storing that on a postres server. Heck, I store a ton more than that at work, and our databases cope just fine. A simple solution, if you really want to reduce the number of records in the link table is just storing the purchase data in a JSON field in the customer table and dispense with the link table altogether. If you want to go smaller, a single 1024-bit value could encode the access to 1024 single episodes, and I doubt Dan will ever need that many. Certainly at the current rate. Only drawback with the binary, which you don't get with the larger json field, is you lose metadata such as purchase date and whatever else you store. But you could keep that data for a couple of years, then delete it, but still keep the binary which is your primary lookup. And hey, you even saved yourself a multi-table query.

Juan Rial

Agree completely — please send reminders as the critical dates approach

Clifford Robinson

Could you clarify (perhaps with a follow up email, or here) what is meant by, “If you bought your shows in the last few years, you are certainly fine for a while.” I purchased the entire back catalog of episodes in mid-2020. I’m enormously grateful for the many hours of learning, entertainment, and escape you provided me during the worst months of the pandemic. I’ve been working my way through a re-listen and am picking up new elements I missed the first time; I envision a third cycle at some point! At minimum, I echo Juan Rial’s post above: I hope you’ll notify us again when “a while” is over… Thanks again for all the effort and time y’all put into the podcast. It really shows, and I appreciate it and you.

Clifford Robinson

why don't you just put all of your content behind a paywall, such as this one? I find the whole pay per cast, download to play system very antiquated.

Levi Rankins

I have to say, as someone who works in the software industry and knows how these things work, I'm very disappointed the hear this :(. Yes, it's true that most outlets don't allow free unlimited re-downloads; but the reason they don't isn't a technical limitation. I assume you will still host past episodes in your server (since we'll be able to buy them again), so the actual data overhead you have to keep in your servers to allow us to redownload episodes is close to nothing. I would understand doing this for free accounts, but considering we're talking about paying customers here, I don't see the reason why. To be honest, I wouldn't even mind paying episodes again because it's not like they are that expensive and I want to support your work (that's why I'm supporting through Patreon in addition to purchasing old episodes). But don't tell us you're doing this for a technical reason, because if someone has told you that, they are lying. It's the same thing as many programs becoming services with a monthly subscription nowadays (like photoshop). Most of these could perfectly work offline after a single purchase, but now everything is moving to subscriptions because it's more lucrative.

Noel De Martin

Ain't data management a spitefull bitch? Welcome to my world. 😂 Consider the poor sap (c'est moi) who has to pull "unbudgeted ∞²+1 storage for everyone forever for free" out of his apparently infinite rectum for a large Midwestern healthcare company that's too scared of litigation to establish, let alone enforce a sustainable data retention policy. (A funny lesson One learned apropos the pesky longevity of data: don't try to get any help from the the legal department or corporate counsel to stand behind a mere IT infrastructure peasant trying to explain how an unlimited data retention policy is not only unsustainable, but also a huge risk during discovery in potential civil or criminal cases-- those people have wet dreams about their billable hours filing motions to block, or, even better, defend against evidence disclosed in readily accessible 20+-year old backups of everything-- "private" email messages and company chat conversations, the intricate bread crumbs of the recently disclosed (ty, NYT! 💕) policy decision to cut off patients' access to their primary healthcare providers, their own medical records, including critical imaging, diagnoses, prognoses, care plans, etc., without forewarning or notification as soon as they exceed an arbitrarily miniscule cap of $4500 in delinquent fees. (And before you ask, no, I didn't omit any zeroes.)) Apropos nothing, but my God! I do so love nested, parenthetical diatribes! That's my coder brain infiltrating my correspondent brain. 🙄

The Bosco

As long as you contact the affected customers directly, with a couple of reminders and a long enough lead time as people may be away from their mailboxes for prolonged periods of time. E.g. on holiday, recovering from surgery, ... Don't be like InfluxDB. 😂

Juan Rial

Thank you for reaching out and letting us all know. I didn't realize that there was a re-download option, but I will certainly double check it all sooner rather than later! Love the show and your willingness to keep it available as long as possible!

AC C

Unfortunate but understandable. Thanks for all the content.

Moosifur