Have you ever wondered why payments to KVS Tool are called 'contributions'?

Using the BA method all of a sudden I am getting CAPTCHAs requested which makes this tool essentially unusable - I cannot read the CAPTCHAs (they are too fuzzy) and even if I could it is totally awkward. Is this new?

Adobe does the same with most of its products now, including Photoshop and Lightroom. Not even available as a one-time purchase.

That said, I still want to have legit data access for KVS. I'm willing to pay for it, too.

Would that not mean KVS would have to pay legitimately for its data rather than screen scrape, and then the donation amount :p would go up? :rolleyes: Sounds like it would be a business model change for them... not likely to happen ...

I wasn't aware that KVS or other similar tools were using such methods to gather data.

If they are taking money for offering the service then I'm not surprised they have been blocked from doing it.

It's been a while since I looked at KVS, but I recall that there were a couple of things that weren't being done via scraping. Perhaps MPM and something else. KVS serves(ed) these direct from its own website and amusingly enough protected it against scraping with encryption and buried keys :D

YGM!

The [Awards/BA-OneWorld] Engine may occasionally request a CAPTCHA verification if you exceed its velocity limits.

You may wish to consider using another Method, such as [Awards/OneWorld] / [Awards/JL-OneWorld] / [Awards/CX-OneWorld] instead.

I would like to BUT One-World does not show JL, and JL and CX don't work for me - I use Crossover on Mac and most methods don't work - I've had to give up on *A methods (but that's OK because ANA is superior for *A in any case). I'll give CX and JL another try and report the specific problems. But I have reported various issues in the past and usually end up with KVS and Crossover support "blaming" each other. In fact I also bought a 'licence' for AwardTravler and will make a decision when my current KVS licence expires which one I will retain.

New info - re-tried CX and JL - they work sometimes - but every second or third search I get some sort of "engine error" or the like.

Yeah, this isn't cool. I'm probably going to become a newly minted EF premium member.

EF is very good, but it doesn't show award availability for BA, JL or CX. It seems to be a better award searcher for Star Alliance than for OneWorld.

That's a good point. Thanks for the info. But since I'll ever only use BA miles for AA, US and CX, I already only use the BA website for CX awards, and even then, just for JFK-YVR and vv.

Edited to add: I just got the email with a google link and some pretty cryptic instructions. I'm just fed up and will be e-mailing in the morning asking for a pro-rated refund and if I don't get a response from them in the affirmative, I'll probably dispute with AMEX, since the service is, most definitely, not what I signed up for.

Being I'm not a KVS member, I guess I've pretty much already said enough, so don't really plan to post any more to this thread. But just to comment on a couple of the replies already, and some final thoughts:

Whatever you or some might think about KVS, and whether it's just buying a tool used for scraping information, or whether, in the eyes of the customer, is a service, providing a turnkey result to their needs is very obviously one of perspective. And just from this thread there's quite obviously a number of KVS customers who assumed (evidently wrongly so) that they were buying a turnkey solution. Just to quote one of the many customers in this thread:

For me to argue further about a service (or tool if you will) which I don't use nor plan to is fruitless. It's quite clear that others felt the same way as what the impression I got about what the KVS product is. And as a result KVS has what appears to be a very big problem on their hands.

I'm merely interested in finding a new availability solution, now that flightstats.com's solution doesn't work anymore. And it's very obvious to me from KVS's and others' responses here that KVS is absolutely not something that fits the bill for what I need. At the moment, ExpertFlyer, or purchasing a service directly from Sabre seem to be the only turnkey solution that will provide me legally with the data I need to make my travel decisions. Had KVS taken a more open approach publicly in explaining what was going on, what they intend to do about it, and maybe offer an alternate turnkey solution guaranteeing a service, I would have considered them for my needs. I've always been extremely leery of any business which sees the need to use excessive secrecy in their business model/products.

It's not a matter of "blame" -- the CrossOver product does contain bugs, which have been officially documented and confirmed by their development team.

However, there are a number of other Mac solutions available on the market, which are not subject to those bugs and enable all Methods within the KVS Tool to function properly:

http://Help.KVSTool.com/#Mac

When doing BA-OneWorld as well as QF OneWorld and GTC - I get this error for the last couple days:

Error 12031: Connection Reset
The connection to the server has been reset
Error 9002: No Data Received

I switched from the Beta version to the regular, and its still there.