The average user is using gnutella solely for mp3s and you can't expect those people to share there whole hard drives.

Those numbers are well enough to work with.

Hello!

First of all it is not called Leeches it is called Freeloaders and they are people that do not share any files.Me personally share 14gigs and 5000 files and add about 20-30 files a week so I would pass according to you but you cannot expect people to share that wast amount of data over the network I think that 75MB or about 20mp3 songs are enough for me so that is the limit I have set in LimeWire that people must share in order for them to download from me.If you want Anti freeloading capability then switch to Gnutella and LimeWire wich is the only client that has this function.Want to talk about leeches talk about Kazaa they are leeching on your bandwith.Did you know that your computer's bandwith is used for the hidden network Altnet for Brilliant Digital's paying customers thats leeching!

As mentioned, most of my experience is with KaZaA. KaZaA-Lite that is, and it has no hidden network, no stealing of bandwidth. As for the sharing limit, maybe I was overdoing it a bit. But my point is that I hate free loaders. I don't wish to waste my bandwidth on them. XoloX seems nice, but if there are other clients with the feature I ask for included already, I think it's time for me to switch.

Greetings from Olav

Hello Olav!

Bealieve me you are participating in a hidden network called Altnet it lays on top of Kazaa but you never see's it unless you pay for Brilliant Networks service.You can read all about it on these sites.Articles:

Article 1

Article 2

Article 3

Read more about Brilliant Digital and their network Altnet:

http://www.brilliantdigital.com/

http://www.altnet.com/

But fortunatelly there is a way to get rid of the scumware go here and download the software you need to get rid of it:
B3D Killer

Thank you for the information Joakim. But as I said, I use KaZaA-Lite, not KaZaA. KaZaA-Lite is KaZaA without the hidden network, the motherf...ing Banzai Buddy and so on. And just to be sure, I ran add-aware and B3D killer after I installed KaZaA-Lite. But anyway, thanks for the info.

What I would like to know though, is: If I decide to convert to limewire or gnutlla, to get rid of the freeloaders, what one should I choose, and why? I'm currently running KaZaA-Lite and XoloX, and I'll keep running KaZaA-Lite. XoloX on the other hand, is very nice. But I don't get much downloaded, and then it helps very little. It doesn't deal with freeloaders either.

Greetings from Olav

Xolox is fine.
In LimeWire there is a feature where you can set up
how many files a user must share not to be a freeloader.
You can deny download requests by freeloaders if you set
"allow freeloaders" to rarely.

I don't want to argue the fact, that LimeWire is the best gnutella client ever, but Freeloader blocking probably doesn't quite work as you think it does...

Who has an active site with *current* stats that are even remotely accurate? ....until then all anyone is doing is throwing stats out none of us can confirm to be the present truth. I am also leaning toward the 66% sharing at least 100mb - but I don't know for sure so *shrug*

Anywho, as far as 'freeloading' goes it is always going to be a problem and if a user doesn't want to share that badly - they won't.
Some things that help the sharing ratio are to do prompt during install if you would like to share files and do an automatic search. And additionally every file you download should automatically become shared to the network. There are many other things, but its up the the user and client to make sharing painless and automatic.

Hello!

Yes it is true that it is hard to find accurate statistics.The article often reffered to on many places is now over 8 months old and does not represent the present situation at all.It is estimated that the Gnutella network grows about 7% each month so it is hard do an accurate estimation.I do not even think that the Gnutella developers themselves really knows any more exactly how large the network has become because with the more recent implimentations to the Gnutella architechture it is hard to get a horizon that is large enough to do that kind of estimates.What might be even harder to know about is exactly how many people that are sharers and how many are freeloaders.But you can make qualified guesses and I share about 14Gigs and over 5000 files and by looking at the number of IP's under the Monitor tab in LimeWire (which is the client that I use) that get the File Not Found message from me I have concluded that about 40% gets that message and fails to download from me wich means about 400 attempts out of a 1000 and since I have set the limit to 20 files which someone needs to share in order to be able to download from me I would estimate that atleast 60% of the Gnutella users do share 20 files or more and since most people usually shares music files and the average size of a mp3 file is about 3.5MB it means in average that these 60% share about 3.5X20=70MB of files.This is ofcourse just guesses but it seems pretty accurate to me when comparing to some other data on various news sites(I have forgotten the specific addresses sorry).

KayaMan, you are right. We can't know how big a percentage share and not. But since I have mostly used KaZaA-Lite, I know this. Pretty often I use the "Find more files" on users that download from me. And it's usually large files, not MP3. And in most of those cases, they don't share. So I'm speaking on behalf of "my own statistics". And what I see is what I believe :D

Anyway, I can't stand freeloaders. And since XoloX doesn't have any "protection" from this at all, Limewire is my next option I guess. Any of you used Direct Connect by the way? How is it? What network/type of sharing does it use?

Thanks for the input from everyone.

Greetings from Olav