changelog
 

Well, well, well. The 4.9.1 changelog is finally up. Apparently at almost exactly the same time 4.9.2 came out.

Unfortunately it seems to have some problems.

Sorry, wrong. They're as inaccurate as ever in 4.9.1. And you don't even claim to have fixed them in 4.9.2 I see. Who suggested replacing them with bitzi rating info in another thread? That seems like a better idea than endlessly trying to fix something that seems incapable of being fixed.

Sorry, wrong again. Everyone knows it by now but 4.9.1 still had downloads hanging at 100% completion, files stuck queued, "Disk Problem" and "filesystem failure" with perfectly functional drives with plenty of free space, and all that jazz.

Now let's look at the 4.9.2 changelog. Unfortunately it's not very inspiring either.

I'd already downloaded the installer but now I'm going to delete it instead of running it. Nearly every file out there will generate this nuisance prompt for Christ's sake. For every file that has a CC license or some such associated with it there will be ten billion that have nothing of the sort. Literally -- that number is not hyperbole but actually a conservative estimate arrived at by scientific means.

If you hadn't said that at least once before without it being true, and if you didn't just get through telling us that Limewire 4.9.2 will be totally unusable for downloading anything but a very narrow selection of mainly mp3 files, and extraordinarily painful for anyone trying to construct a large library of jpegs or something of the sort instead of a small library of music, to the point of inducing madness, seizures, and suicidal impulses, this might actually be worthy of interest. As it stands, it's rather as if a politician got elected on a platform of lowering taxes, raised taxes, and is now running for reelection on a platform of lowering taxes, while also promising that if they get elected they will completely revamp the motor vehicle bureau so that you have to wait in line twice as long, and instead of once a year you have to do so every time you change a flat, replace a signal bulb, put on or take off winter chains, or put another 10K on your odometer.

Thanks, but no thanks. I hope the misguided license-prompt feature will be gone in 4.9.3. Nearly every file lacks a license on the network and this will remain true for the foreseeable future and including for the vast majority of legal files, as well as (obviously) all the illegal ones. This feature seems designed to please the RIAA and MPAA rather than the users, even though it will chiefly inconvenience people downloading legit files that don't happen to come with a CC license attached. Which means EVERY USER, BAR NONE, with probability one.

(Of course, the illegal mp3s will all have bogus CC license files or similar accompanying them inside a week, while the vast majority of innocuous files still won't have license files, bogus or otherwise...)

I have to second that sentiment. You're going to deliberately make it painful and awkward to download any file other than a DRM'd WMV by making downloading any plain ordinary no-DRM-here file result in Limewire nagging you, so that you have to acknowledge a nag box for every non-DRM file you try to get? Incidentally shoving Windows Media formats down everybody's throat and effectively telling all us linux users to eff off? Are you effing nuts? I thought you actually wanted to continue getting money for Limewire Pro. Evidently, I was wrong.

It won't matter how pleased the RIAA is that you are taking measures to punish not only anyone who downloads illegal files, but even anyone who downloads legal files that aren't their own DRM-shackled Windows-Media-only monstrosities -- not when you find your bank account empty one day. You'll be at least as bankrupt as if they'd sued your ***, and probably more so, since its doubtful they could win a suit even with the horrible, horrible Grokster precedent. There's no sign of active inducement at Limewire.

The RIAA might LOVE you for adding this execrable "feature", but I doubt they will PAY you. And once it's in an official release and not just some beta hardly anybody knows exists, you can bet your asteroids nobody else will either, even if you went on to totally cripple Limewire Basic.

I'm wondering what's up with Limewire 4.9.1 raising its own priority on WinXP myself. I have very good reasons for lowering its priority in Task Manager, including "it makes all other apps on the machine unusable if I don't". And even when LW has been set to low priority it still seems to grab the CPU and slow other tasks down (which I thought was theoretically impossible!) -- even soemtimes rendering task manager itself (which runs at high priority) unresponsive.

And to top this off, within days of installing 4.9.1 this happens: my web browser becomes unresponsive, along with task manager, and when I finally get task manager to respond it shows Limewire back to "normal" priority! I didn't raise it. It should respect the user's choice if they change it, and not change it back. I hope you removed this misfeature in ... oh, nevermind. I won't be upgrading ever again anyway it seems. Not if I want to keep my sanity, since nothing I download (images and text files, mainly, and all quite innocuous) has any kind of license file and the only wmv files I ever see are spam I don't want anyway.

*off to download 4.8.1 and then delete the limewire site from bookmarks*

Bye.

Oh, and by the way, I want my money back.

Game Over.
 

Have you read the news? The latest beta, according to the changelog, will nag you for every file you click to download that doesn't have some kind of DRM in it, like a WMV does, or some other sort of accompanying license info.

In other words, for 99+% of the files you download, and any media files that actually work on an open source media player.

If you don't believe me, go to limewire.com, features, feature history and read about it from the horse's mouth.

So much for Limewire.

Anyone have a clue how easy it is to migrate your shared files structure and incomplete downloads and suchlike to Shareaza?

What a bunch of &*?*& :rolleyes: You can disable easily that dialog by checking the always same behavior on the window. Of course, you loosers would prefer LW stop making the software. It is either that little 1/2 second loose on the first download OR LW is not anymore... difficult choice :o

Lame, leave us, sane people, alone please and return to the wonderful combo of whatever P2P you were using before.

You sound like a RIAA/MPAA drone in fact.

:rolleyes:

Eh -- you can turn it off? It didn't say THAT in the changelog.

Or did you expect people to actually install the beta and discover it that way? That would have entailed taking a big risk -- that it would NOT be possible to turn it off, leaving them either stuck with the "feature" or losing all their incomplete downloads which is what apparently happens if you go down a version. Not a very palatable choice for many of us, I suspect.

Not that I can see much point in this feature even so. Almost every file out there will have no license file -- a lot of them because they are public domain and anyone who published a license file for them would actually be attempting piracy! Theft of public property or some such.

The most important thing is that you should update the changelog post-haste to say YOU CAN TURN IT OFF! in big bold letters at the end of that line. And make it off by default in version 4.9.3. There's already posts complaining about this in other places around these forums, and the changelog has only been up for a matter of hours -- you'll have to nip this in the bud before the pro users really do start deserting in droves. I think the general assumption would be that it would behave like all the other warning dialogs when downloading a file, such as the one for when the file already exists. None of those has an "always use the same answer" option, despite how useful it would be for downloading a big batch of files without having to say no to overwriting every single file it decides you already have...

haha , just realized that looking at IPs, yousoldouttotheriaadincha, Spherule, DeathToDRM, TX-1003 and Thermonuke are the SAME person :rolleyes: What a lamer, but you are funny that you think you can fool us....

Actually, all it shows for sure is that they are customers of the same internet provider, and maybe all in the same city. Most home user ip addresses are taken from a pool shared by all the users of that ISP, at least in that area, and don't stay constant. So two posts with the same source address aren't necessarily by the same person, though it's fairly likely, and they are probably in the same area.

Hrm. TX's post had me worried and the changelog had me even more worried. Why doesn't it say in the changelog that this can be turned off?

In any event, it was by no means obvious to anyone who didn't elect to download and run the beta despite expecting that it would annoy them into reverting to an older version, thereby losing all their incomplete downloads and stuff. I can only assume it would become obvious to someone that did run the beta despite having been given every reason to give it a miss -- nothing substantially new since 4.9.1 and one thing that sounded potentially unbelievably annoying to the point of being a show-stopper.

I think you should make this feature's off-turnability widely known as soon as possible. Your first inclination might be that people are "spreading fud" and their posts ought to be deleted, but odds are they simply assumed it couldn't be turned off any more than the "overwrite, yes or no" one can be, or any of the others that can pop up when you double click a search result. And their intention was probably not to actually drive anyone away from Limewire but to make the developers seriously rethink a feature they thought would be a massive pain rather than a benefit, or add the capability to turn it off, or something of the sort. Deleting their posts will more than likely fuel all kinds of rumours, fears, and paranoia -- precisely what you want to avoid. "I saw a post saying that future limewires will nag you to death until you switch to windows media player! And then it disappeared! They don't want the truth to be known!" It isn't hard to believe that at least some people will react in such a fashion, and when their posts are deleted in turn, the same rumors will spread via unmoderated backchannels. There are at least 2 unmoderated Usenet groups with a p2p focus, one of them fairly active, and there's email. Heck there's even Limewire itself. I could create a file in my shared folder and name it "avoid limewire 4.9.2 it will nag u if you download anything not riaa approved -- pass it on" if I wanted to (I don't).

The weapon against ignorance isn't silencing anyone -- it's posting the clarification/correction/whatever wherever any ignorant opinion or partial information that can result in a misleading conclusion appears. Which is what you did here, but you also made a threat that seems pointless. Either it's idle, or it's not; if it's idle it's pointless, and as pointed out above, if it's not it's a big mistake that will make the problem worse instead of solving it.

The best spot to put the information that this thing will allow people to turn it off is in the changelog itself, amending it. So far, I've seen a couple of posts complaining/worried/warning about this change and all mentioned the changelog; one even mentioned exactly how to navigate to it from the limewire home page. That is fairly responsible behavior by people who simply only got part of the truth, I suspect, and it means that an amendment to the changelog will be seen by many people who see the frightening posts you are so concerned about.

The other thing to do of course is to post followups reassuring people that they'll be able to turn this thing off anywhere someone has posted worried that they won't.