Gnutella Forums - V1.31 - End of the road

Ok, I'm giving up on this program. I used it when it came back after long absence, in June, but it was too buggy back then, so I switched to the first thing in the list on gnutella.com, which was BearShare. That one worked just fine, but then it started requiring that I install various crapware with it, so I said goodbye to BearShare and went to gnutella.com to check again. And yay, a new version of XoloX was there. I installed it and... here is what I think:

1. It crashes approximately 10 seconds after start-up with variations of the same error message: "<a varying fragment of javascript> is not a valid integer value", or something like that. Looks like it's trying to find some number in some random part of some script. I found a way to cure this problem - set Proximitron to Bypass mode. But then I encountered problem #2...

2. It spams me with ad banners of the worst kind - with moving images, imitating buttons and drop-down menus, etc. I hate that crap and I normally don't see it when I browse the Web, thanks to Proximitron who replaces banners with empty placeholders. And since XoloX crashes unless I disable Proximitron (problem #1) then I have to endure the banner torture to use Xolox. Hmm... that definitely rules out leaving it running in background when I'm not downloading anything for myself, and therefore sharing my files with other people. Not good. But maybe at least I can find and download what I want faster, as XoloX claims to be Ultra Fast? Let's see...

3. I did this many times, trying to download several different files and also different versions of the same file (after aborting previous requests that died). I find a file, I request Download, it starts downloading it from several sources and gets to 99% Ultra Fast indeed. But then... It starts saying that some part was "dropped due to incorrectly served information", and goes back on the percentage somewhat (I had results from 56% to 97%). Then it apparently drops the source that provided incorrect information (the number of sources decreases by 1) and tries to get the missing part from another source. Fine by me. But then it all happens again... and again... and again... until it reaches 0 sources. Then it starts searching for new sources, and of course can't find any for long long time, so the whole process dies and I have to abort it. Question: if multiple sources had different versions of the file, then how come it dropped all the way to 0 sources? Shouldn't it get the whole file from some 1 source? I think there is a bug in this part. But anyway, the Ultra Fast part failed miserably. I don't want to get 97% of the file Ultra Fast. I want 100% of it, even if it takes longer.

In summary, that does it for XoloX. It's still buggy, and it's now also a SpamWare. I uninstalled it and installed the next item from gnutella.com list - Gnucleus. And got everything I wanted with the 1st try. It downloads from multiple sources and I haven't seen a single "dropped due to incorrectly served information" case. I don't know if XoloX was faster in reaching those initial 99% than Gnucleus (I'm on DSL and I really don't care if it takes 80 or 90 seconds), but Gnucleus at least works! And it has NO ads at all. If your point is that these days you have to sell your reputation to advertising sponsors for your project to survive - ask the Gnucleus author how he does it. His project is also Open Source, so maybe you should look at the code that handles multiple sources and fix your bugs.

Anyway, bye-bye XoloX and thanks for not working, as it made me try something else and I found Gnucleus. Otherwise I would probably still have to tolerate those ad banners and turn into a download-only leech instead of contributing by sharing my files.