I agree with 'Nobody' - I think it sux to use bandwidth downloading files that I personally won't ever use.

But I think it's a great idea to have a cache of files I have previously downloaded which are deemed 'useful' by the gnutella network, however it decides that.

I have a question though - if I search for 'brinty spears' what is going to stop me getting individual results for all the sub-parts of that one giant popular brinty spears mpeg, when all I want is her latest mp3? (OK, bad example, but do you get what I mean?)

Basically, it does come down to a protocol change, I think, even though a very small one.

What about a user of an old version searching? If you just use the current protocol and put the filtering at the client-level, then old clients will be swamped with search results for partial files. You will be creating, say 100 files in the place of every 1 file now, and then distributing them say 100 times as much, so in fact 10000 query hits suddenly where before it would have been one.

I don't want that!

Also the point about caching of files with offensive content is very valid. This is why freenet works the way freenet does, because no-one can hope to create a filter that will filter all files they find offensive, and many people find it morally objectionable to knowingly host files they find objectionable .. so freenet encrypts everything so that you can't know what you are hosting, allowing you to say, ok, either i play or i don't but at least i will never know what horrors i am distributing .. therefor the culpability is on the people sharing those files.

This moral benefit is not a clear benefit to all users, but the legal benefit certainly is. If you can't know what is being stored, in most countries currently that means you aren't responsible for it, and secondly, noone can point the finger of blame because they can't decode the contents unless they know what it is anyway (in which case they could well be the people who caused the file to be stored on your system - it's a clever protcol!).

Unless you can answer these questions, 'real swarming' should be very optional, and not enabled by default.

In this case, how many people will enable it? Perhaps you might want to set up clients so that people can only download swarmed files if they also host them, to encourage people to turn it on. I dunno.