Torrents are on for the next LW release. See http://www.limewire.org/blog/?p=133 for a taste of the politics involved, and http://www.limewire.org/blog/?p=146 for the design issues.

I must say what they are trying to I don't like one bit. Even if they warn a user that a download will stop if they kill an upload, they will be able to kill it after download has completed (correct me if I'm wrong).

They only way to stop leeching is to implement the share ratio in to the program. Like say anything under a 1/1 is totally unacceptable and will disable torrentprotocol.

We all know that most home broadbandservices have much faster download than upload. A user might be downloading three 4 GB+ files at a time. While he is downloading these files, he's uploading lets say 1 GB. After the downloads finish he then removes the files from his shares meaning he is leeching 3 GB

BTW this should also partly apply to the Gnutella network as well because this is what is going on with many users. I understand very well that torrentsites dislike the idea that Limewire will be able to download torrents. If this is really what they're going to do then every torrentprogram on earth will be releasing a new version that will block ALL Limewire users from connecting to their program. Some allready block bittorentprograms that have the option of DHT connection because of a slight chance that advanced users find a way around the shareratio and just leech.

Where would be a good place to start a discusion about this that the developers actually see ?

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Limewire 4.12.3 / Newest Phex / Newest Azureus

I recommend using either an old Limewire version without BitTorrent support or Phex for Gnutella, Azureus is BitTorrent. None of this Limewire Gnutellatorrent hybrid crap.

General P2P Network Discussion

I know what you mean & mostly agree. But what about people like myself who don't have great upload capacities. If such a person could only download a multi-GB file at 5-7 KB/s then it would keep that slot busy for a long, long time!

But I was concerned about the same thing for the general communities as I read through the details yesterday. And what about LW's Gnutella sharing whilst using bittorrents which was an obvious point made.

My thoughts would be to put a limit on upload abilities in both worlds. ie: a minimum upload capacity of a reasonable amount before both protocols could be used at the same time. eg: 5 or 10 KB/s (perhaps per slot)

Shareaza, whilst a good program, is a good example of where being in more than one p2p world at the same time doesn't work very well if certain measures aren't taken. Raza is thought of as a freeloader by some people, due to the minimal downld speeds you can get from them in most cases. Whilst I say that, raza is the only other pc app I have some appreciation of thru experience. But it does have those suggested draw backs which I think LW could design around. Pity raza proggies have such a weak attitude toward gnutella 1.

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Having an option for the longest time doesn't make it right. Raza is no good anyway and I'm sure they have less succes getting torrents than other torrentprograms. Using BitComet a pretty popular file 700 MB took me 1 hour 40 minutes

And I'm not even on a private tracker

I understand your concern LOTR but it is still very possible to keep a 1/1 ratio. I did not in any way mean that you would only get the same speed downloading as you were uploading. I meant that if let's say 5 torrents were downloaded maybe 4 GB in all then the user would get a message saying that leeching is not allowed and no more torrents until ratio is back up to 1/1 (4 GB up only torrentfiles) same should be implemented for the Gnutella network with maybe 100 downloads because of size difference. The reason (I'm pretty sure everyone has noticed) that Limewire is slowly going downhill is because a bigger and bigger portion of the users are nothing but slimy freeloading leeches.

I look carefully at share ratio when using bittorrent. I do not clear a download until I have uploaded at least the same amount that I have downloaded. I do this by both downloading and uploading during my flatrate hours and then only seeding 2/3 of the day This gets me close to a 1/1 ratio. If I don't have something to download I still seed during my flatrate hours getting me over the 1/1 ratio.

BTW LOTR you're more than welcome to copy the portion of the thread dealing with this issue to "General P2P Network Discussion"

(edit: Thanks. That was fast )

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Limewire 4.12.3 / Newest Phex / Newest Azureus

I recommend using either an old Limewire version without BitTorrent support or Phex for Gnutella, Azureus is BitTorrent. None of this Limewire Gnutellatorrent hybrid crap.

Well? BTW Stief was not the originator of this thread. lol Sleepless was but this section has been saved for the public

I dislike polls, can't understand the thread topic, and don't like this thread.

Hmmm--what to do, what to do.

I think this thread is very relevant. Don't really know what to say about the poll. Guess it all depends whether they implement the shareratio in the program. There are too many leeches on the network and many of them do not have the capabilities to use torrentprograms thus Limewire will be giving them the option of leeching of torrents as well as the Gnutellanetwork. I think this will be a real shame.

This torrentscenario that they are planning is far from perfect. I tried Azureus now and it even has a shareratio warning light. It also informs users that downloadspeeds will suffer from a bad shareratio. I think that the Limewire developers should learn from that and implement something similar into the Core where it's not easily bypassed.

I'm voting yes on this issue. If there are changes made for the better that yes can be ignored

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Limewire 4.12.3 / Newest Phex / Newest Azureus

I recommend using either an old Limewire version without BitTorrent support or Phex for Gnutella, Azureus is BitTorrent. None of this Limewire Gnutellatorrent hybrid crap.

Hi Sleepless

I just bounce over from the other thread entitled "Tired Of One-Way File-Sharing" started by KK and I will give some thought now to your suggestion of enabling LWs "chat" facility, as you said, I don't have to use it.

Anyway, I am here to discuss the issue of greater freeloading if Torrent facilities are incorporated into LimeWire.

Well first off, I am all for anything which gives LW greater sharing capabilities because I have felt for some time now that the pool of available files for sharing has been gradually shrinking. And anything or facility that allows more files into our constantly shrinking pool has got to be good.

However, I agree that allowing more people access to our pool without insuring that they are putting something back has got to be detrimental to the P2P community as a whole. Therefore, may I suggest that widening the user base of the P2P community should go hand in hand with tightening up the “anti-freeloading” facility within LimeWire.

That way “you cannot come to the party unless you bring a bottle” (I hope that is a term that most non-English speaking forum members are familiar with).



UK Bob

Dangerous idea. The MAFIAA always interprets that as an inducement to piracy
and new users tend to be put off by what appears to be selfish barriers to entry.

Gnutella is a sharing network, unlike the trading networks like BT, DC
and others. The reason it is so successful is it doesn't attempt to force
people to conform to a tit-for-tat trading model, and that's why all of the
gnutella developers reject such measures as ratios and inducements.

The pool of available files is still growing but if you sit still on your particular
favourites you eventually see nothing new and see some of your favourites fade
away. The trick is to keep exploring and moving to other shelves in the library.

Personally speaking, my original experience of file sharing was with Shareaza - I started using LW also because I do quite often want individual files rather than torrents and (mostly at least) LW is excellent in this respect.

I also notice that LW members are very very keen in uploading my torrents - and they're very welcome to do so. If it is feasible to incorporate bittorrents into LW without detracting from it's current excellent function, then well and good - otherwise, why not use Shareaza for this?? Can't really see a problem with getting the best of both worlds in this way.

BTW EVERYBODY STARTS AS A FREELOADER.

You're right that everyone starts as a freeloader. The only problem is that too many people never stop freeloading. They think that since Limewire works anyway why bother

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Limewire 4.12.3 / Newest Phex / Newest Azureus

I recommend using either an old Limewire version without BitTorrent support or Phex for Gnutella, Azureus is BitTorrent. None of this Limewire Gnutellatorrent hybrid crap.

After doing some more checking up on how this shareratio system works I have found something very interesting. It seems that it is the trackers you use that check up on your shareratio. Whenever you activate a torrentdownload it has to get info on the torrent. This info is gathered by trackers that are embedded in the torrent. when the tracker connects it also transfers your shareratio on that tracker (not all downloads). If the shareratio is lower than the rule set for the tracker the host is banned from using it until ratio is good again, hence the download won't work. Not all trackers have this rule or have it set very low. Private trackers often have above 1/1 ratio or even 1.5/1 while most (not all) public trackers aren't as demanding.

I almost can't wait until all the Newbies come on this forum whining about how only some files will download even when multible hosts have the file

Maybe Limewire could make it's own tracker for all the freeloaders

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Limewire 4.12.3 / Newest Phex / Newest Azureus

I recommend using either an old Limewire version without BitTorrent support or Phex for Gnutella, Azureus is BitTorrent. None of this Limewire Gnutellatorrent hybrid crap.

I don't know where you download your torrents. I never used any pay-per***** trackers or any 1337 non-public torrent site. I'm not dense enough to leave my email address in such places, not even a hotmail alias. Anyway, I've download well over 1000 torrents in a few years and never had trouble with ratios. BitTorrent really isn't fair in the literal sense or as some interpret it. Most people on this planet use miserable ADSL or even worse. I for one can download 8-10 times as fast as I can upload. Do you really expect me to seed a file for almost two weeks when it took me day to download it? Maybe you do but I can guarantee you few people will. Just accept that there are people with little and others with more bandwidth. The onces with less often even pay more - in relation anyway - for their bandwidth so it's not like these people are horribly selfish. Sometimes I upload files 10x as often as I download them but most of the time I get at best a 1:1 ratio. Sometimes there just is *nobody* to upload to. That's often when you download at full-speed from a single seed. The larger the file, the less likely that I'll upload it just once because it will get in the way of more important stuff. That's what I also prefer on Gnutella. You can download file by file. If you don't care about the whole set, there's no point in downloading everything and you also have to wait only a few minutes to hours before you have something you can use. When you download with BitTorrent you can hardly preview files nor can you watch them on the fly. Also with Gnutella, all my shared files are *always* availble. Sure my bandwidth will have to be shared among all popular files but Gnutella is full of redundancy. It's better to get a file at a moderate speed than not all, right?

Technically, BitTorrent has little what Gnutella doesn't have and nowadays Gnutella is often just as fast as BitTorrent. Of course not with every file, you'll need a couple of source or at least one fast but that's not different with BitTorrent. Sometimes people even think BitTorrent invented swarming. Nonsense, "download accelerators" swarmed downloads from FTP and HTTP servers long before Napster existed. Gnutella introduced (proper checksummed) swarming in 2002 or even 2001. So it's about as BitTorrent, just that the latter wasn't really well-known or popular before 2004 when a sun exploded. The success of BitTorrent is not the protocol. It's the torrent listing web sites. These prevent spam effectively and increase the quality of content as well as its quantity. Gnutella really offers to combine both. A distributed search engine which is subject to some amount of spamming but link listing sites work just as well with Gnutella. Magnet links are heavily under-utilized, mainly because all Gnutella developers were in a long hibernation and never got around to implement a Distributed Hashtable (DHT) which is required for efficient searches by SHA-1. The latter isn't strictly necessary for Gnutella though as it's very flexible. A tracker-like server with source caching would work just as well. Now if people download high quality content, they will high quality content et voila you'll find more high quality content when you search for it. BitTorrent definitely had a positive effect on Gnutella as well. Many files are originally distributed over BitTorrent and then re-shared in Gnutella.

Therefore, I think the developers of LimeWire are on the wrong track. They may be successful nonetheless but I'd prefer if they improved Gnutella instead. For example, they should have finished their DHT before adding BitTorrent. In the long run, having a DHT for Gnutella *and* BitTorrent will be rather redundant. I believe, BitTorrent support was mainly introduced due to the BitTorrent hype and because they were scared of losing further users (marketshare) to it. I would say this fear is unnecessary. There will always be lemmings running after the next hype but after all Gnutella and BitTorrent have been complimentary so far. Whereas BitTorrent offers you something, Gnutella is the huge store that let's you decide yourself what you're going to look for and each work well in their own areas. I've used BitTorrent extensively but I've never stopped using Gnutella and actually I have more upload bandwidth available due to BitTorrent because the files I get from there, I get really fast. Getting *those* at least at the same time from Gnutella would have taken much more time and resources. As said both have different publishing schemes. A couple of days or weeks later, you'll get the same stuff just as fast from Gnutella. Personally, I really don't give a flying **** whether anyone downloading from me is a freeloader or not. There's someone who likes the same stuff as me. That's cool and that's all I care about. It's a good backup method anyway. Maybe some day, I'll lose some of those files and then I can just get them back again from Gnutella. You shouldn't try decided whether someone is a freeloader or not by looking at a snapshot of its upload history. Maybe someone is a freeloader for a year and then becomes a gracious uploader. This freeloader issue is mainly caused by ADSL anyway. If everybody had a symmetric internet connection nobody would give a **** upload throttling the upload rate or even preventing uploads completely. ADSL was only introduced to sell commercial pay-per-view service later. For these you only need much bandwidth in one direction. These plans have mostly failed so far because people found a better way to use their bandwidth and commercial services are simply too greedy or just as uncomfortable and unreliable as the worst free P2P network.

I'm following your discussion here with a certain kind of fascination. A very interesting topic with well weighed points of view.
It reminds me of a similar discussion right in the beginning after I became a member here, though the topic was not the assimilation of the torrent technique into the LW/ Gnutella clients.
I guess each of us has different philosophies and approaches. So, I'll reduce my comment to the point of freeloading, or leeching as you call it.
"Be fair and share" would be a logo everyone of us could agrees to.
But if sharing becomes compulsory or mandatory, can you still call it fair??
If your taste (i.e. the files you offer to share) do not fit the taste of others, would it be right to punish you (i.e. restrict you in your downloading capability due to a lack of uploading)??
Gnutella exists despite the freeloaders.
Merging LW with Torrents (or at least creating clients that support both ways) is the next natural step in the evolution of filesharing, and it won't be the last. Sooner or later those who are contra freeloaders (in both groups, gnutella users/ developers and torrent users/ developers) will see that despite the possibility only the minority will leech.
Further developments will go in the direction of supporting up and downloads to sites like rapidshare, megaupload and their likes. Or maybe the possibility to use one's file without downloading on your own computer (depending on the development of the internet speed).

Though just my 5-cent-worth

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Most of the time, the networks are being flooded with fake files
I already expained how (search the forum)

So you need a dedicated source

I've only had 2 bad files from torrents in the 3 months

where as i've had quite a few on this network (even I get caught somtimes)

They haven't really done much to the bit torrent community yet
as the files that are rubbish is being deleted

Sgt

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