Thank you again LOTR!
As you needed sleep, I did find the solution through the wonderful world of Google.
I had to open a port through my firewall. Now I'm an Ultrapeer...and seem to have been the only one since. I am running VPN, and hope that does not cause anymore speed problems. More or less, things are DL faster, and UL are not affecting me so much.
With thanks, POR.

Check the sourceforge, everyone, WS 6.0 is now up (though not for all platforms yet). Please consider donating at https://igg.me/at/wireshare.

WireShare 6 for Windows now out!
 

It's been a long time, mostly because of "growing pains" as we graduated from Java 8 to Java 13 at one fell swoop... but WireShare 6 now has an installer and everything else. The icon was the result of a quick conversion as we worked hard to push this out to you all, but here's the result.


https://sourceforge.net/projects/wir...0.exe/download


This. Was. A. Trial. Between (I believe) Java 9 to Java 12, there was no intuitive way to package JAR files for distribution (which is why we released the JAR file in raw form, for early access people). For Linux distros that aren't Ubuntu, Debian, or Fedora, it's still a major pain.


If you want to donate---this project cost us quite a bit of money---the link is https://igg.me/at/wireshare

The project had not been costing anything. Why the sudden costs and why the sudden push to gain money?
SourceForge and Github should not be costing anything at all for a free open source project. I've opened projects without any setup or running costs.

Exactly what warrants the program to be pushed to version 6, a major release. What 'major' improvements have been made? What major improvements will people see in the program's performance? Did you fix all the bugs before considering making changes? (this is normally the logical thing to do.)
Do you know what are the bugs in the program? (I certainly know what several of them are.)

Cost who exactly? bigjx made no mention of costs and was surprised about you switching things around. You show up once or twice every year or three and want to make drastic changes without discussing things with the actual coder (sometimes breaking the program which bigjx has to fix.) You are not the coder. Anybody can open a project but that does not make them the king of all decisions particularly when they are not coders. That also does not fit with either a 'team' project or the spirit of the open source community.

Just curious. :)

Not sure why you feel you should be getting money out of the project. (Greed?)

This was not a bugfix release. The primary improvement was an update to Java 11+ compatibility. Previously it worked with Oracle Java 8 only, and was subject to its limitations; OpenJDK 8 didn't work either.




I'm not making a cent out of this. I decided to jump back into the WireShare project after a leave of absence for study purposes, and because it wasn't compatible with Java 11 or greater (latest test release is Java 14) I decided to hire people (yes, for money) to get this functionality coded in.


Because the improvements have already been made, I'm slightly above $500 out of pocket (coder asked for $20/hour, which was low end compared to some other bids). I want to recoup sunk costs, and possibly have money to continue hiring people to fix bugs. The biggest bug that I've seen, from extensive testing, is the "welcome window", which is coded in HTML and displayed with Mozilla XULRunner. This seems to rub Java the wrong way, so the HTML doesn't always display and it goes to fallback.


If BigJX is having issues with what I've done, I'm happy to speak with him and iron out some sort of roadmap so we're on the same page.

I guess it's the making of overriding decisions without discussing it with other members of the team. Did you ask the other members of the project if you should hire devs? Nobody asked you to hire the devs. Did you ask bigjx whether you should shift java versions? It appears to be up to your whims and that can be a little irritating, particularly when the most active members of the project are totally left in the dark.

The hiring of the devs was not a team decision, it was yours and your choice to be at a personal expense.

How do you define the word 'team'?

I understand where you are coming from and how you feel. I can't begin to understand how BigJX feels; I would not be happy if somebody wrested control of the team's direction from me, either.


That said, I believe this is one big misunderstanding, and I am fully prepared to accept some degree of fault for this. What happened was that I had need of WireShare for work reasons (I now run a software startup, so you can imagine WHY I needed it)... anyway, as soon as I opened it up, there was serious performance degradation on my (moderately old) computer, the kind you don't see with other Java apps. Linux support was nonexistent. It also refused to connect for half a day, notwithstanding my new GNUTELLA.NET file, firewall gone, whatever I did it took its sweet time.



I attempted to reach out to BigJX several times before pulling the Git logs, seeing that there hadn't been any changes checked in over a few months, concluding that he'd quit the team (my mistake), and then transitioning the codebase over to Bitbucket for testing (it'll be moved back to Github very soon).



That was when I did my research, found that Java 11 can offer serious performance improvements because a "vendored" version can be cut up in such a way that only the necessary parts of it are included, and hired the appropriate manpower.



I understand this is no way to run a team and I apologise to BigJX and everyone else involved. I am trying to fold WireShare into my organisation, simply so that we can share infrastructure; there's no question of this turning into a for-profit business, or anything like that, just trying to gain users and turn this into a full-time thing rather than a spare-time project.


I am happy to work with BigJX again if he'll forgive me for the way I've run the team. He and the community have my unqualified apologies.

I wonder where you'd be had bigjx and I not merged projects with the present one six years ago.
My understanding is bigjx tends to go through particularly busy periods at work and thus might be slow to respond at times.

I know one reason, a redundancy in the code approach. My own custom version is particularly fast to connect (as good as 2009) and reliable with no major drops during a session, a particular problem I had been witnessing over a few years regardless of program version.

Out of curiosity do you ever connect as an ultrapeer? Do you port forward or use UPnP?

After being away in the heavily fire affected region of my state for a month, upon returning found my programs were all firewalled and took me some time to figure it out. My partner's ipad had stolen my static network address. :D (My video card had died upon returning before eventually getting things back up.)

I do not recall receiving any messages either here or at SourceForge from you. As LOTR has said, I am somewhat slow at times to respond due to traveling and work and I do need to get better at acknowledging the receipt of messages.

Up until now the main contributors to the code have been LOTR and I. I am not a java coder nor do I have any formal training in any coding language. I am self-taught and learn as I go. The WSHR source is also very complex and massive as you well know and I for one welcome any help updating it and making it better. It was original written in Java 6 for 32bit machines and works well if you have 32bit Java installed. These days that is not always possible or practical especially with macOS. The reason why it uses the fallback browser for the home screen when you have 64bit java installed is because the embedded browser was MozSwing. MozSwing was 32bit and uses a customized 32bit version of XULrunner 2.0.

We have a Developers discussion board at SF where we, as the developers, can discuss the issues and direction of the project. Also, if you need a custom version for your own purposes you could have started a fork with your custom changes such as; icons, color scheme, and branding without changing those items in the master code.

BigJx

I am still using WireShare version 5.6.5 since version 5.6.6 had connection problems so I had to switch back to version 5.6.5. Has anyone tested version 6.0.0? Is it worth updating? I downloaded WireShare 6.0.0 (BigJx) but before updating I would like to read other users' impressions about this release. With version 5.6.5 I have had two major issues- I cannot find a way to disable update check on start-up and with forced Windows shut-down it loses its data and settings.

I can only help you with a couple of points:
There is no way to disable update messages. I never liked this every session message concept but my request to have an option to delay to once a week or month or so was ignored several years back.

Forcing Windows shutdown will always risk losing data and settings. It's something that should only be done as a last resort.

There will always be a version that does not work well on some people's systems. There are often workarounds but should be done with care.

The major difference in version 5.6.6 over version 5.6.5 was the addition of the integrated, auto-updating security feature requested by (and maintained by) Lord of the Rings. This feature was a major improvement to WireShare in terms of security. Just like antivirus software, the security files need updating periodically to protect users from malicious hosts and spammers. Unfortunately, the connection issue that you and others may have had with version 5.6.6 was not due to WireShare itself but was caused by a faulty online security file it had auto-updated to. This issue occurred if you had the "Strong Security" selected and was cause by an empty line in the security file. So, once the problem was identified, the online file was corrected and the issue was resolved.

Sorry, there is currently no way to disable the update notification at startup. I never considered that some people might prefer to use outdated versions. I will add a "Do not remind me again for this version." option to the next release. You would have to update to it though.:laugh_2:

The major improvement in version 6.0.0 (Windows and Linux) is the code base was updated from 1.6 to Java 1.8 and added openJDK compatibility. The minor improvements made were; removed the Japanese blocking options (requested by LOTR), updated client preferencing, fixed some small bugs, and bundled the Java 1.6 runtime into MacOS app.

BigJx

FEEDBACK:



In WireShare 6.0.1 Options, the Transfers tab, Configure Torrent Settigns button, there should be "Seed forever" by default, current 1 day seeding only is too strict.


Also on Transfers tab in Options i think should be ~/Downloads, not ~/WireShare/Saved/ (or ~/Downloads/WireShare/ to prevent people accidentally sharing downloads not related to WireShare)


"View / Hide transfer Tray" should not be active by default, why not display Downloads tray right away by default, so user does not need to spend time searching where it is.

Originally it was for longer, but due to (legal) pressure the LimeWire developers changed this. At least that is what I was told when I had the same concern over a decade ago. Unless I am confusing this with FrostWire version 4.

Personally I agree with your concern.

One problem there is I see a lot of users on the network of various gnutella programs that share from their default downloads folder. They also accidentally share other files they may have downloaded via their web browser. This sometimes includes private information.

Just now looking at a particular host presently running on the network, their share statistic is:
196612/8,192 bytes

That's a total of 8 KB. Divide that by 196612 to get the average file size. Bytes becomes bits.

I am unable to browse the host to verify what kind of rubbish they are sharing. I doubt the host user is aware of this. But it is just this kind of accidental file sharing that is best avoided where possible. With WireShare having its own distinct downloads (& share) folder, this problem is minimized.

Your final point is also a good point. Though based off LimeWire 5, the LW 5 version was rebuilt from the ground up and intended to imply simplicity in its visual design compared to LW 4.

Replying regarding the issue of accidentally sharing sensitive files from Downloads folder, for example sensitive .pdf, .docx downloaded via web browser may be reduced like this:
1) changing description in Options / My Files / Configure (unsafe file sharing) by mentioning something like: Make sure that your Downloads folder is not common for other apps to store sensitive files like documents.
2) disabling documents sharing for downloads folder permanently internally in app

3) set default downloads folder to ~/Downloads/WireShare/ because i think for Linux user it is more convenient location he may not want to change as much as current ~/WireShare/Saved/

Not a bad idea. :)
Some persons purposely share certain types of documents. This may also include pdfs or MS Word docs. This might include non-copyright ebooks or 'how to' docs. h4x5h17 points this out in their post of https://www.gnutellaforums.com/gener...tml#post377157

There is a safe sharing option listed under 'programs':
Attachment 7041 (Edit) (An option we agreed should be incorporated. It's just not as obvious as it should be when listed under programs.)

I did not necessarily agree with the original download location design which went through some kind of name changes within the LW 4 sub-versions. But on the other hand, you need to differentiate between downloads/saved and incomplete folders & the present system does that but within the WireShare parent folder.

I personally used customized locations and folder titles. (1) A different hard disk drive with different downloads folder title. (2) Video and audio file downloads are each sent to different folders. This makes it much easier to find particular download types. Many years ago I even had them sent to different hard disk drives.
But that is a customized approach and nothing to do with the defaults.

WireShare Update
 

The WireShare GnutellaWebCache (GWC) that is used for bootstrapping is now being redirected to https. As a result, all WireShare versions prior to 6.0.2 will no longer be able to connect to the GWC as https was not supported in those versions. Therefore, it is now recommended that all users update their WireShare to version 6.0.2 to; avoid connection issues, get security updates, and get update notifications in the future.

BigJx

This is an unexpected issue and earlier WireShare version users will no longer be able to get update notifications due to the https change. The https change was forced upon the WireShare project, not by choice. For example, version 5.6.6 no longer receives any form of notifications including version updates. Also versions 6.0.1 and earlier can no longer access the primary GWebCache (GWC.)
But the https change will have benefits. That includes potentially improved communications through a firewall and other benefits.

That's a shame. What Java is required and will it work with older PC's? I had a lot of trouble updating Java last time and making it actually work.

No java update is required to upgrade from either v6.0.0 or v6.0.1 to v6.0.2. The code is still Java 8 based (Windows version requires 32bit Java).

BigJx

Ok that's what I ran into last time then. Both PCs at Windows 7 64 bit. Java 1.6.0.
Wireshare 5.6.6