Bad idea. The one big reason gnutella is so successful and has the
widest variety of files is because it welcomes all people even if they don't
have files to share. Attempting to force people to share something, anything,
always results in either them sharing millions of junk files from a Windows or
program folder or they end up sharing a small collection of what everyone else
already has shared.

The amount of people on the network with nothing to share has steadily
dropped over the years to a stable level of about 12%, and that's perfectly
healthy for the network on the whole. Any selfish attempt to force the
percentage lower will just drive people away, doing more harm than good.

If you want a totalitarian network which ends up forcing nearly everyone into
copyright infringement then go to something like DC or one of those private
torrent trackers that think they're so kewl and leave the rest of us to share
in perfect freedom.

I do both

But like Stief it doesn't work very well to do both at the same time. I notice a great drop in how many uploads I get per session when acting as an UltraPeer

BTW I really wish that they would get that freeloaderfilter working. Then the people using Limewire can choose if Freeloaders are allowed RARELY (meaning people who share get priviledge in the queue). They get first the freeloader gets second

i think its always best to have as many ultrapeers as possible and file sharers but the people that only download or dont leave there limewire up make it kind of unfare slowing down the network for us and not helping it, they should make it so you have to be an ultrapeer if you dont have pro

LW chooses it's ultrapeers. Not much point forcing someone to be an ultrapeer if they have a slow connection... that's not going to speed things up!

I have a bit of a moral dilemma with this whole sharing/ultrapeer issue.I share my files but when i download something i burn it to cd or dvd so i can watch it/listen to it away from the computer.To save space on the hard drive i delete the more popular ones because it would make very little diffrence if i had a song that another 15 people had.But a few months ago i was downloading a certain tv series which had over 20 episodes and left them all on there to share even tho it nearly filled my hard drive because they where from America and during the daytime here most of the people where either offline or not sharing so i left it like that for a week and had an incredible ammount of hits [around 200] and people where constantly downloading it after a week i decided to burn the files to dvd and watch them on something bigger than a s****y 14inch monitor then i deleted them and cleaned my hard drive.If i download a really obscure song [the young marble giants being a typical example] i leave it on my shared and let other people download it.
Same with my rare/obscure videos i have left them on because they are obscure and not many people will search for them but for a fan of this musician the videos are a goldmine.So it's personal choice really share the hard to find stuff and delete the others.Same with uploading i recomend put rare stuff on and leave the chart stuff where it is.