In one week’s time (August 3rd), we’ll be making some changes to the free version of Graboid Video.

Due to significant abuse of the free program and peak load issues that have reduced the speed and reliability of the program for all users, we turned our recurring free version into a one month free trial some time ago. On August 3rd, users who were on the older recurring free plan will be converted as well, which means recurring free access will be turned off completely on their monthly anniversary date.

Simultaneously, we’ll be making the one month free trial better by increasing bandwidth to 5 GB and extending video availability to the full 200 days of access.

Thanks for your understanding, and of course we hope you stick with us.

For the time being, we’ve disabled non-Paypal credit card processing for premium memberships. You can still use a credit card to upgrade your account, it just goes via Paypal first. This change does not affect existing members in any way. If you used a direct credit card to sign up for your account, your renewals will continue to go through on that account.

Please post any questions or concerns in our user forum. We don’t allow comments in this blog.

The official version of the software is now 1.2.3.1, now available as the download off the website. It is not a mandatory upgrade and does not have any new features, however, it does correct some launcher problems that have been experienced. If you’ve been having trouble with 1.2.2.1, go ahead and download and re-install. Any videos you had previously downloaded will not be affected.

Our authentication servers were out of commission from 9pm EST to 12:30am. This didn’t affect anyone who was already viewing or downloading, but did prevent new connections. Apologies to those who were affected. We’re working to upgrade our hardware and put these intermittent outages behind us.

Service is back to normal now.

Some users are experiencing difficulty with our automatic upgrade from earlier versions to 1.2.2.1. Upon upgrade and launch, a blank white screen appears and the program halts. We do not have a fix for this currently, although we’ll be releasing a new version of the software on Monday that should solve the problem.

** Note on July 13 - AVG Firewall can cause the white screen problem, although there may be other causes as well. Try disabling your firewall and see if that fixes the problem.

We apologize for the service downtime that caused some users to be unable to download earlier today.

The issue has since been resolved and the servers are all running optimally right now.

If you’ve been getting the message “there was an error requesting download information for the selected file”, you can fix it by moving to the latest version of the Graboid client, version 1.2.2.1. If you are already on 1.2.2.1 and getting this message, please post at our support forum.

We’re trying to get to the bottom of why earlier versions of the client software aren’t working.

To upgrade to the latest client, go to add/remove programs in the windows control panel. Remove any versions of Graboid client. Remove Mozilla Activex control (version 1.7.12 or similar). Then get the latest version from our website and reinstall.

When you launch, you’ll see at the top left of the Graboid Window, “Graboid Video v1.2.2.1″ If you do not see this, then you don’t have the latest version.

For technical support please visit our support forum.

There was a partial server outage from 5:15pm to 6pm. We’ve cut back on new member signups to preserve service quality for our existing members, while we work to increase capacity. Thank you for using Graboid!

For technical support, please visit our forum.

We hoped that a few days of the new comment feature would settle some of the misuse down, but it hasn’t and we’ve removed it again. Most of the comments were just confusing new users and annoying existing users. We’re re-thinking the architecture of the comment function and we’ll reintroduce it when we think we can make it more useful.

Some of the suggestions to us have been very helpful, including the suggestion from a user to allow posts only from the downloaded area, so people who’ve actually downloaded (or tried to) could comment. We also think that allowing commentary only from premium users would limit the more frivolous of them, and perhaps even having it be an entirely premium-only feature.

For certain, if we re-introduce the feature, we’ll have a bury function similar to digg or other large-scale commentary sites.

Comments are off for this post, but feel free to discuss in our user forum. Thanks.

We’ve had a problem the last few days with users not having their bandwidth reset on the proper day. This was a result of the same server issues we had last weekend and was fixed today. If you experience any problems with bandwidth not resetting, please wait one day past the date your expect, and if it still doesn’t reset, email technical support and they’ll take care of it, whether you’re a premium or a free user.

For technical issues, please visit our forums.