The Scoop: The Demise of Available Tools

OK, I've asked in the past that people not run software (also known as robot services) that checks my website every minute of every day. It runs up my bandwidth hugely. I have had some even recently who are running up several tens of thousands of accesses per week. And then there are some people who just check by hand, refreshing the site hundreds or thousands of time per day.

While I greatly appreciate the fandom and interest in my products (I really really do!) it causes troubles on the site and my site admin gives me a very hard time about it. I'm worried that if I exceed my bandwidth allowance this month that I may have my site shut down...

So, after some consideration here is the solution that we came up with. Available Tools is gone from my site and will not return. From now on the only way to find out about a product release will be through this blog. I will make an announcement of whatever is available and I will provide a link. The link will go to a page on my site that is only accessible from the link I provide here on the blog. Additional links off the same blog page announcement will take international users to the additional postage pages so they can make up the extra postage.

I'm hoping that this will shift the robot users and obsessive site checkers over to this blog and keep the traffic more manageable on my site. We'll try it out later this week and see how it goes. Thanks for bearing with me and I look forward to many more future tool releases! :)