How to Spot a Psychopath

There's a new file-dump site called Wiki Upload, which is currently in a somewhat rough and ready state (for instance, the "country" field in the sign-up page is a long list of Zimbabwes). But it appears to be functional enough, with one caveat that I'll get to in a moment.

It's the usual deal - upload files for anyone to download, no stuff you're not meant to share allowed. But Wiki Upload seems to be less encrusted with arbitrary limitations than most of the other file-dumps. And, as the magic "wiki" word implies, it's aiming to be community-based, with uploads policed for legality by the other users who want the site to succeed.

The only major limit, in fact, for the basic free accounts is that files that nobody downloads for 30 days will be deleted. They promise longer periods in the future - and I guess if there's no pressure on their storage space, they may well keep stuff for longer anyway. You get 4.66Gb of storage space with a free account, too, so you can upload a whole single-layer DVD, copyright permitting.

Oh, and the crummy uploader permitting, too. It's your basic Web form arrangement, as used by various other sites, with no resume if the upload fails or stalls. And it currently reloads the page constantly to update its completion bar, which gets old fast.

Also, there's a bug at the moment which, once you've uploaded a file, changes all of the links in your list of uploaded files to be... that file. So if you make an account and upload file1.foo and then file2.bar, your uploaded files list will now contain two entries for file2.bar and nothing for file1.foo any more.

You can work around this by making your own list of the download URLs for each of your files after you upload them. If you don't do that, and you haven't given your files descriptions and tags when you upload them, there is at present no way to find them without just fishing back through the http://www.wikiupload.com/download_page.php?id=[number] URLs until you find yours.

So, you know, Wiki Upload is a little bit beta at the moment. And it could melt away like the morning frost if it doesn't manage to cover its costs, which will be considerable if it becomes popular.

But what the hey, it's worth trying in the meantime, for stuff that is not of earth-shaking importance.

I have, therefore, uploaded the original MPEG 4 video files for a couple of the Google Video clips from this post, for the benefit of anybody who's interested in seeing the unmolested video quality of the Xacti VPC-C6, or just interested in seeing whether their download speeds from Wiki Upload are better than eight bytes an hour.

Thanks to the file list bug, I currently have no idea what the URL for the first file I uploaded is. The second one's here, though.