This feature disappear in this version .At this time I m connected to 78 friends. Awesome...I go back to ver 1.4.5 .I dont know what's really change in this ver , but I don ' t understand why this main feature was disable

Exact sentence is "drop nodes with less than X freinds" in the connect panel in preferences menu

This is because to save bandwidth most of the peers no longer report this information. The numbers you see are now more or less meaningless, it may show 78 but you may really be connected to thousands. The feature was removed because it no longer served a useful purpose.

I'll make some search and see how many response I get.Hope what you say is true ...

Unfortunately, the only way to make sure you're well connected now is to keep enough open, but this is rather wasteful.

In Gnucleus you can use the tools->statistics->bandwidth tab to see how much traffic a connection is using (more traffic means likely more hosts too).

I'd like to see some sort of minimum bandwidth setting to take the place of the "friends" one. Even better would be something that looked at the number of search results and other "useful" packets a node returns. A higher result to query ratio might be an even better judge of how "good" a node is than bandwidth or connected hosts.

I try to connect to the same 3 hosts with the both versions (one then another i can't do it on the same time , not enough threads open).And I see that ver 1.5 use less bandwith (send rate) but the answers I get for same queries were the same .
I know that people want to save traffic , but when I use gnutella i want first be sure to have a lot of answer .I use gnutella because we can find rare files ....despite it costs a lot of bandwith .Who cares , it s free for me !So now if i want use new ver , i have to remove manually poor hosts in my connection panel .Annoying ...

The problem is knowing what really is a "poor" host. Using the older version doesn't really help. Since most of the other peers stopped sending these messages, the values can't be trusted to mean anything. A connection showing 1000 hosts may, in reality, have less than one showing 0. All it really is, is a count of how many older hosts are on that link, and that's likely to decrease as time goes on.

When you are freshly connected to GnutellaNet "poor hosts" with view friends means you won't have a lot of answers to your queries (depending of what they share).If you stay a lot of time without any change and friends go away from your view , it becomes true : friends are overestimate.But often hosts are refresh and if they don't you certainly connected to " rich hosts " with permanant connection (56K users don ' t share a lot and dont stay a lot of time usuallly) , so we can think that number of friends could be a good approximate number.But in the new ver , refresh often can't make any change , connecting again to "poor hosts" ...Friends is certainly not the best parameter to know what are best hosts .We can imagine a better parameter like files shared or bytes shared .But I think we absolutly need one to improve our search ...
When I use Gnucleus , I am exactly in this case .I connect to GnutellaNet .Wait for friends few minutes (a maximum with the magic "drop nodes with less than X friends") .Make my search .Then download. And let it do the work .I stay often connected during night to share...During the night what you say can happen:loose friends.But I have always enough to share.Believe me !

You're missing what I'm saying. The number of friends is no longer anywhere near accurate. It's not an over-estimate, in fact it's always going to be far, far less than the true value.

Look at it like this....

1) You have "x" number of real friends.

2) Only "y" percent of them report themselves - the rest are *invisible*.

"y" is decreasing rapidly as more and more peers stop reporting to pings. This now includes most major Gnutella apps - Gnucleus had little choice but follow suit. A connection showing zero friends may in fact have thousands.

I understand what you're saying - even if the friend count worked it's not the absolute best way to judge a connection, but it no longer works at all!

Guntella peers have no idea how many friends they're connected to anymore. It's now about as meaningless as just picking a random number.

If you ask me, once the Gnutella developers reached this decision, they should have just removed the friend count entirely - it does nothing but confuse people now.

and not very happy to learn that.So now all clients are like Xolox .Start and..."Connected" .That ' s all .You have no idea of your view even if you see a lot of friends .I think that people will be disappointed .When you make a search you like to know when no answer if your query doesn't exist on GnutellaNet or if it don' t reach enough people .I thought that number of friends was a good parameter to anwer to this question .But now I will never be able to answer my question when i make a search that "fail" :"You re dream , don't exist on GnutellaNEt "or "rare file need lot of friends" .Sad...