Simple solution would be to have less strict limites for members. Non members are restricted to 15-30 downloads every 6 hours or even less. That way it would encourage more members as well as preform its duty.
Also, the bandwith used depends on the type of file, someone could download 30 spells which is only 300-600KB (on average) every 5 hours, that is not much. However someone could download 30 times 4 MB maps which is 120MB in 5 hours, which is very high.
Thus limating downloads is not really an effective method of reducing bandwith used.
More effective I would imagine would be to asign everyone a download value which notes how much space worth of files they can download. When they download a file, it removes the file size from the vriable, thus reducing the ammount they can download. When the size of something is more than the size of space to download they have, they can not download it. The advantage of such a system would be it would mean that people downloading models or spells could download a lot more than if they were downloading large maps, and so allow more fair distribution of bandwith. Also the ammount asigned every day could be calculated from server load, thus if fewer people are downloading every day, the value could be raised to allow better useing of server space. The down side is it is probably hard to program and might slow the server down even more.
Anyway, such limites could probably be relaxed in times of low server usage. Thus during the day the limate could be in place but when usage drops over the night time, then could be the perfect time to download files without a limate.
In the end it is up to Ralle thou, and I am glad I do not get the server is busy messages I used to.
