Greetings,

Help!  Is anybody listening anymore?

Images linked via thumbnail on items in the store are time-locked to 5 minutes after you've loaded the page!  So if I open up a dozen tabs, and then walk through them tab-by-tab, taking time to read and view the thumbnails, it's VERY possible that I won't even be able to load the images from the later tabs, and I'll have to reload.

Now I work with Amazon Web Services all the time, so I know exactly how this works, and it just annoys me.  But if I were not technically inclined, I'd click a thumbnail, it would partially pop-up, and then...it'd...just...hang there.  Because the JavaScript that you're using can't handle the refusal that AWS sends.  Because it doesn't even have the ability to let the user know, 'Oh, hey, we're terrified of folks hotlinking to our images, so we put a miniscule timeout on it.'

You absolutely must bump up your allowed time, and you should consider even getting rid of it at all.  There's no reason that I can't come back to an open item page a day or two later, and everything just work to click on the thumbnails, etc...  Breaking that is Very Bad Form.

I'm going to guess you had problems with people directly linking to your images and using a few dollars of the amazingly cheap cost of S3 per month, but there are significant ways to avoid that, that do not absolutely demolish your customer interactivity.

For example, S3 allows for referer(sp!)-based restriction, so you could eliminate your delay entirely and restrict access by a renderosity.com referrer.

This has been frustrating me since the changeover; at first I didn't understand what was going on (thought it was local connectivity failures), but once I looked at the image links, it's just making me more annoyed.  Please, PLEASE, fix this!

But I've reported other bugs (since the first, which was promptly fixed, and thank you!), and not heard a peep.  I wish you had a real bug tracker, so that we could at least know, 'Wont Fix', or something...

--  Morgan