Downloading "Too Much"

I received a warning that I'm downloading too much. What's up with that?

This is just a friendly reminder that you are free to ignore, but keep in mind that all downloads performed by Downie are on your own responsibility.

Downie identifies itself as a web browser (usually Safari) so most requests that it makes cannot be differentiated from the ones being made by the website itself, but the amount of requests can be detected by some websites and can lead to a user account suspension. What the website detects and how much is "too much" depends on the website and the website can change the criteria at will at any point in time.

It is advisable not to download "too much" - again, it's up to you to assess what that is in your particular context.

If you want to protect your main account that you normally use, sign out of the account within Downie, and/or create a new account with the content provider and use that exclusively in Downie.

Please also note that while the warning is displayed after 50 downloads within 1 hour, there's nowhere chiseled in stone that it's 50 in 1 hour. There is no exact telling what the sites consider as "suspicious" behavior - if you download 50 videos in 5 minutes and then wait an hour and download another 50 in 5 minutes, it still can be considered suspicious.

I tend to compare this to a house - let's say that you should enter a house and you know that there are booby traps somewhere within the house, but you don't know exactly where and how they are triggered. Now the question we're trying to answer is "how to enter safely".

There's no way that you can know that unless you're the one who's set up those traps. As an outsider, you can learn based on the people who die entering the house before you and you can warn other adventurers about something you've observed, but your observation may be false - for example, you can notice that everyone going through the window got hit by an ax, so you may think that the window is not a safe way to enter, but you may not notice that the ax only swings by once a day, exactly at noon, which was coincidently when you observed those people trying to enter via the window.

General rule of thumb that can be recommended is not to download more than you can possibly watch within the same period of time.