Digital Art Zone

Since the new forum is not very user-friendly yet and searches can still be very frustrating, I’d like to know if there’s an official forum thread where to post DAZ store issues instead of problems with their products. Yes, I could find several threads where people were complaining about the current situation here at the new store. However, I decided to start an own thread for the issue I experienced today:

There seems to be a major bug while browsing and displaying product details. For almost every single product the description shows a totally wrong requirement which seems to be generated randomly. For example, for the “DAZ Studio 4.5 SDK Release Candidate 2” “the Girl Ultra Catsuit” is needed as a requirement. Hah? Another example: For a planned purchase of “Majoliqua V4” you also have to own “Tropical Cave”. Few minutes later, it happened to me that for every selected product the same requirement appeared: “Basicwear for V4 Unimesh”. Not even a refresh by pressing F5 could resolve that issue. Really annoying!

But there are even some pricing issues in the new store which I don’t really understand. For example, the “Content Creator Kit upgrade” costs 99 bucks whereas the full product is free of charge. On which policy or market strategy is all that based? Really strange decisions and behaviours here at the moment. Even some bundles exactly cost the same as their contained single products! If there are no advanced search functions in the near future, I guess I’ll come back in a month or so, until all those shortcomings and errors have been corrected by the DAZ team.

Btw.: Not even the spell checking engine of this forum knows the term “DAZ”. That really makes me think…

Answering the last point DAZ is an acronym for Digital Art Zone, so unlikely to be included in a spellchecker.

All the other points that you have raised are listed in the various thread around the forum, in particular they are noted (several times) in the Official, sticky, threads in the Commons, and some have been addressed in the Announcement threads, such as this one

http://www.daz3d.com/forums/viewannounce/2055_4/

Which is displayed at the top of each forum, and is updated regularly/

Thanks for your reply, chohole.

I’m still confused, anyway. All the problems maybe mentioned somewhere around the whole forum, but it’s not so easy to find all hints if the search function isn’t working properly. There is also no DAZ guide around which describes what to do if all downloads fail.

After all I did my first purchase today with my new account in this “refurbished” store. And right from the start everything goes wrong! Only the first download I did few hours ago was okay. Now I’m sitting here, trying to get all the other downloads to my disk and it doesn’t work at all!

When clicking onto a download link, nothing happenes first. Also clicking again on the same link does nothing. No busy cursor, no “Please wait” message, nothing. Only after about 30 seconds a message from my IE9 browser appears offering me to download a file whose name string is about 100 (!) characters long. If I want to save it, it still won’t work. The only thing that happens is, that the download counter in the list is reduced for that item by every attempt. Now I already have expired links and no downloaded product!!! I don’t wanna resume trying, at the end all links will be expired!!!

Is this a genral bug or do you currently have such server issues? If yes, when will they be solved and how do I get back my “expired” downloads I never got?

Normally I’m a calm person, but it seems that this situation here is driving me really crazy!
Please help! Thanks in advance!

Well I don’t use IE, haven’t for some time, so can’t tell you if it is a problem with IE or not.

However I do know that the last Windows update, which was for Win7, Vista and XP was deemed a critical update for windows users who also use IE, so di you allow your computer to do the latest updates?

AS to losing your downloads, if you have used up all 4 attempts from a prelim set, the you can reset, by going to “Your Itemised order history, and finding the item and resetting it.

You are allowed 3 resets in a 3 month period.

I have only heard of one or two people who have had download problems, that is not a bug that hits many people.

With the other things you mention.  The random product requirements is a well known “feature” whish has generated quite a lot of hilarity, and is a bug that is being worked on.

As to the CCT.  AFAIK they are included in the latest release of DS4, so there is no need to even purchase them, but were not included in DS3, or earlier versions of DS4, which is why they are in the store.

Yes, since I initially started with DAZ3, I was putting them also on my DL list.

I don’t think that the problems are only on my side, since I never had such issues and I always have the latest Win7 updates applied. However I’ll try again using Firefox and I will tell you if that worked.

I’m sorry to disappoint you, but it seems to be that this is really a general issue on DAZ’s side.

When downloading using Firefox (my tried version is 12) everything works fine. But when using Internet Explorer, the download can never get started, but the download counter is reduced anyway. I also tried downloading from another, older PC from where I was logged into my account. This time it was WinXP and the IE version was 8. After those 30 seconds I was mentioning before, the same long string appeared presenting the DL link. After trying to download, at least WinXP brought up an error message after some seconds (I’m using German OS on every PC), telling me that “the requested Internet Page could not be found”. Strange, because I was just clicking on a download link that worked in FireFox before.

So I guess that’s really something you guys should be aware of since not all customers use Firefox and it seems that it’s NOT depending on the OS and IE version! It must be somthing general!

I hope there’s a solution soon, also for other customers having the same problems!!!

That’s a new problem. I haven’t heard of that one before. Can you submit a bug report on it so they are aware of it.

That was my initial question starting this thread which I didn’t get answered yet…
Where do I post/report such bugs???

Bug Tracker.  http://bugs.daz3d.com The bug tracker requires a separate logon.  You have to create an account.  I strongly recommend you use the same username as you use on the forums so people can correlate bug reports to posts. Once your logged on in the upper right hand corner of the screen you’ll see a drop down. Select “DAZ Web Search” Then select Report Issue.

I tried to open a new acount on the bugtracker forum you referred me to, but up to now I didn’t get any confirmation email to activate my new account. Not even this procedure seems to work fine.

Sorry, I have to give up for now. I also have other things to do and I can’t sit here all day just to re-post bugs I just explained in detail in this forum.

I strongly recommend that you admin guys forward all the experienced user problems directly to your colleagues in that bug forum instead of letting the custumer do all that stuff.

At least I know now that I can only use Firefox with DAZ downloads and I have to avoid IE8 or IE9 on any PC OS for that purpose, so that my product download counter isn’t cleared without getting the product itself downloaded. However, as the “reset” can bring back such “expired” downloads, I still have a chance to get it all done. Maybe another day…

The email should’ve been instant. Can you check your spam box.

Any news on whether the IE problem has been fixed? I had the same problem a couple of days ago (the older style files downloaded fine, but the new zip ones couldn’t be found) and haven’t had a chance to try again since.

Honestly, I don’t know if the problem has already been fixed by the DAZ team. I tried few days later after my initial posting and it still didn’t work on both of my PC’s having IE installed. As it would take too much time for me to wait for a solution, I already downloaded all my files using Firefox. Since then I didn’t test any re-download via IE anymore.

Another reason to get crazy here in the new DAZ store: It seems that there might have been major policy changes to make life harder for DAZ customers who are looking for simple product information.

Yesterday I purchased “Beautiful black hairstyles” and tested it successfully. In order to find out more about the product’s features I just wanted to skip through the product’s readme file. But there wasn’t any documentation copied to my ReadMe’s folder. No matter how much time I spent for searching the Content folder, I couldn’t find any readme file(s). After all there was no other way than to google the internet from another computer. Finally I discovered the product readme on the following DAZ server:

http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/read_me/index/14633/start

I was just lucky, because there was no visible connex to the product name, just a number in a link. However, when opening the readme info online, the included file list states that all readme files should have been copied to my PC by the product installer:

\ReadMe’s\14633\file_list.txt
\ReadMe’s\14633\start.txt
\ReadMe’s\images\14633.jpg
\ReadMe’s\images\logo.png
\ReadMe’s\ReadMe_14633_1.0_Beautiful Black Hairstyles.html

So what? Why haven’t all infos been properly set up on my computer? Do I have to copy/save/convert/print them all manually?

Unfortunately my computer from where I’m running my graphic applications is not supposed to go online. What do graphic artists without an online connection do, if they are in the middle of a working process and just want to look up some hints for products they purchased a while ago? Run to another computer and search the whole internet without knowing what’s the correct search string?

Come on guys from DAZ, this can’t be the right approach, just to save 5kb per download file. Who had that bad idea to separate the readme files from the product installers? Did I have just bad luck chosing this product or is this a new trend now at DAZ? Did anybody else have similar experience with new DAZ products and not included readme infos?

If yes, what’s the correct way to find/get all the files downloaded/installed as listed in the product’s file lists?