So how long do you have to wait then? A month? If you don’t have a life then it would work. I can’t leave my pc online forever just to get a good ratio.

Bram Cohen’s suggestion may very well be the way to go.

Furthermore, the ratio requiremnts have nothing to do with making downloading faster, they are there to keep torrents alive longer.

The bittorrent tit-for-tat protocol encourages fast downloads, but it has no encouragment to keep torrents seeded once they’ve finished.

If it takes 6 months to get a 1:1 ratio, you can bet people are going to leave the torrent open that long. Once you have many torrents seeding, it’s easier to keep your ratio up, as statistically a few torrents will be uploading at all times. This time-lag before your ratio approaches 1:1 is why sites have grace-periods for their ratio reqiurements.

People are rational beings. They join private sites with ratio-requirements because thoes sites have better seeded torrents, which makes those sites more popular. Indeed, by emphasising specifically download/upload ratio, economics dictates that people *will* upload more, via faster connections, leaving them open longer, and allocating bandwidth more aggressivly.

Somes private trackers have group buys , they pay for some products that will be exclusive for them. Depending of your users class, you will need to wait X time until the torrent is available for you. The ratio will affect your class type to get materials more faster. Donor have free ratio download. For preventing the hit and run(new member enter and download all what he can until banned), they have also trusted / untrusted user , when someone is trusted , he can download exclusive stuff, for preventing a little bit more leaking and hit and run. This is not perfect , but i found this a good way to keep something you buy under control for a certain time. One day it will leak anyway. Problem is that people always want thing for free .. internet is a good way but sometime you need to make an effort on your side too to keep the quality and the community.

Now the problem is my ISP is turning off the unlimited access .. this will be hard to maintain a good ratio with this.

Leecher purposely choking upload speed, regardless of public or private. So the tit-for-tat is just worthless to reduce leeching. DON’T BLAME THE PRIVATE SITES… In fact, if it weren’t for cost of servers, I like the invite only method.

The thing people needs to understand on private trackers is that its OK to have a ratio under 1. The minimum demand on private trackers is usually somewhere between 0,3-0,5 and there is no reason for people to panic if they have a ratio around 0,6. Som people have ratios above 1 and some have below, isnt harder than so.

If the ratio system is going to do any good it NEEDS to be a pure mathematical ratio (without freeleeching and bonuses) that shows how much people contribute to the site.

Fixed.

I like the ratio “thing” it makes it more addicting, but if you have a bad connection its not fun at all, exspecially when you have dorks making you feel bad in forums cause your connection sucks.

People get so addicted to joining torrent sites, They turn into major assholes. If their ratio is better then yours then they feel they have the right to put you down, or make you feel lower class. It not right to take it that far, but kids will. Kids dont know any better, but to be better then everyone else, thus proves another point… WHY ISNT THE PARENTS SPENDING TIME WITH THEIR KIDS!!!!!!

I could go on and on about this shit, but its just my opinion. Does it matter that kids stay inside 24/7 creating what we call agoraphobia? They stay inside so much that they fear to go outside, because of the addiction of torrent sites.. It could happen…

GO OUTSIDE AND BE APART OF THE WORLD!

Good for ADSL users like me who can never seed 1:1 because of the damn quarter speed upload.

http://www.greedytorrent.com

Bram has said on NUMEROUS occasions that the protocol is designed with the idea that NO CLIENT OR TRACKER TRUSTS ANYBODY. It’s expected that every client is out for it’s own best interest. The protocol handles THAT environment (where nobody trusts anybody) quite well.

It starts to break when you try to modify the environment (private trackers) to control behavior.

Private trackers have problems keeping torrents alive BECAUSE THEY ARE PRIVATE! Public trackers have more seeds and people downloading. Why shouldn’t you let more people join your swarms? The WHOLE THEORY is that more people downloading is BETTER. If your torrents suck because of leechers it’s because you have itty bitty swarms of a size that bittorrent was NOT designed to handle.

Exactly. bittorrent is an extremely inefficient protocol. bbs/ftp with 1:3 (and sometimes 1:5) ratio were far better. 1:1 indeed – huge waste of electricity.

I havent been bothered Port Forwarding, (‘unconnectable’) yet I am a member of a torrent site and doing very well, using crappy Australian broadband with a d.l speed of 5* my upload speed… and I have uploaded very very few of my own files. Just leave your torrent program up for a while and everyone is happy…

I am yet to see how people who want others to get to atleast a 0.5:1 ratio are greedier than those that don’t want to get to a 0.5:1 ratio!?!

It’s as if the article he/she read simply said “hey, ratios aren’t necessary”, and she’s replying to THAT, rather that to what has *actually* been written.

Please people: have a THINK before arguing with well-thought-out opinions.

Bram knows best. Leave it to Bram.

lutherblissett.net

However, this optimistic view leads him to believe that abuse of the protocol is due to private torrent sites requiring good ratios from users to continue using those sites. I am not so optimistic, and think this development merely led to the rise of the particular abuse that has been implemented in several clients. Other unexplored ways are surely possible, but haven’t been uncovered yet since they aren’t a priority considering the way things are now.

Now i agree with him that ratio shouldn’t be the emphasis in the file sharing community, if only for the obvious reason that there are only few initial suppliers and many leechers that eventually seed (or not), or else because some people just have the kind of connection that allows them to seed well over a gigabyte an hour while others can only manage a couple of dozen megabytes. But he fails to recognize the importance for private trackers, especially smaller ones, to secure the seeding of torrents so people actually want to join and stay, maybe even help paying the server costs.

His proposal for a new way to calculate ratios is an interesting one btw. But maybe an easier solution is for private trackers that require 1.0 ratios to set their standards a bit lower than that, as that would accomplish the same thing.

A ratio of 0.5:1 is fine and nothing bad. if these private sites were right in thinking leeching was a problem why are the public sites better than they are??? this is not including the quality of content however which is always far better on private sites and far more up-to-date for rare and specialist files

If you can’t live with a ratio, if you won’t be able to maintain it, if you won’t give something back to the community (eg uploading your own stuff), then private torrent sites aren’t for you. Go use Piratebay. Big deal. Boohoo.

There are people around with ADSL connections, for which the upstream bandwith is typically the 1/4 of the upstream, or worse.
Maintaning a ratio of 0.4 – 0.6 is doable, but anything over it is a real pain, more so on a shared connection, or for those who can’t keep their computers running bittorrent all day and night.

Rules are rules, though, but they do keep some people out just because they can’t technically keep up with the 1:1 ratio.

On the subject of ratios encouraging people to game the system, back when I was a kid on such BBSs, I’d write really cheesy little programs in QB and compile them to a bloated 100K or so to improve my upload ratio. Programs like “stobe light” which would flash your screen white and black and such.

I had no other way to get files before downloading them. If you came in late to the system and there were no new files on the scene for you to get first and then redistribute, you were stuck.

“You are on Ratio Watch because your ratio is too low. You have 3 days 9 hours to upload 1.09 GB more (required ratio is 0.25).
While on Ratio Watch, maximum additional download before account is permanently disabled: 9.86 GB”

I’m a member of several private sites, including the music one people keep refering too, and i dont have any problems, i dont even have a seedbox or a 10mbit upload, strange how that works for some people, but others just want more and more and more, and for free, without shareing back.

Ratio sites arent greedy, its you people who want it all without giveing anything back that are greedy.

exactly as Drood has pointed out its the rich get richer and the poor stay poor in most cases.
im not old enough to have connected to BBS’s but i have come across the odd Ratio FTP a while back and i didnt use those either i got the stuff elsewhere.
to me ratio enforcement is just a bunch of nerds having power over a lot of people and they like that. the really strict hit’n'run policies and ratio rules and all that.
one site im on you get a warning if you dont seed for 3 days or something after youre done with the download. what if you have to turn off your computer or something dies or go on vacation or something. another site though was good about it, i got a hit’n'run and i PMed a mod there and explained i was doing something in my computer and had it shut off for a while and he said cause i had a decent ratio and was polite about it he removed the warning. just some of this policing over the ratio is getting kind of out of hand on a lot of sites. one site i got a warning for stopping seeding on a file like an hour after i stopped cause i had to do some other stuff and couldnt be using torrents for a while. he was actually there watching the people connected and saw i dropped off right away and got me for it *shakes head*

also what about people that share a connection with others int eh house and have scheduled torrent times? they get screwed royally the way it is set up now.

There’s also the fact that your ratio gets absolutely hosed if you come to a torrent late. Sure, you get it quick, but you can’t recoup the damage done easily, especially on sites like one I’m on where if you’re ratio is below 1.0, you have a 10 hour delay on downloading torrents. That means by the time you get it, all those 1.0+ whores are done, you get the file in record time, and because those whores are all… Well, whores, you stand very little chance of recouping the damage. It’s a system of haves and have nots. The haves get all the ratio benefits, the have nots get stuck with lower ratios, and can’t really get them higher, because of the way the site is setup.

It’s really sad to see the ratio thing come back. I remember back in the BBS days, if I connected to a BBS that had a share ratio (or worse still, where you had to upload before it would let you download anything) I’d immediately disconnect. Sharing is fine. Ratio’s on BBS and torrent sites emphasize greed. A conditional exchange. “I’ll share with you, if…” when the utopian scenario is “I’ll share with you unconditionally.” Sites like Mininova prove that ratio free can work wonderfully.

A site I’ve been associated with for ages dropped ratios completely last year because of everything I’ve just said. It comes down a lot to why people are running torrent sites. Is it to share the wealth with the community? In the case of the site I just mentioned, that’s why they dropped them. The site is there to help people get access to stuff they couldn’t ordinarily, not to force people into sharing if they don’t want too. Other sites with hardcore ratio enforcement, that’s not their first priority.

Another site I’m on has no ratio enforcement to speak of. If there’s something you want that’s dead, you send a mass reseed request. You’ll always get at least 3 people come on with the file. No ratios, no threats. Just a nice, sharing community.

Ratio is a pointless concept, and to see the creator of the software agreeing with me was a rather nice sight to be greeted by today.

One final thing ratios don’t take into account: Folk on capped connections. If you’re limited to X number of gigabytes a month, having to upload 50+% of what you download will very soon add up.

Usually there are either 1 seed and 0 downloaders when you can be lucky if it gets popular one day, or 10-20 seeders and 0 downloaders that isn’t going to do any good for your ratio. Either you download it and hope that you can get the ratio up on some other torrent, or skip it.

gkenobi wrote:
digg sucks.

I’d add to that:

Bram Sucks

I bet he was banned somewhere and now he’s all mad.

__________________________________________________________________________

nice. you stand on the mans back and tell him he sucks. fyad oink.

Im a member of alot of those site , im lucky enough to have a good connection , so i can keep seeding . Im very frustrated with ratio but i want to stuffs , so i figure out a way to send stuffs with big files to maintain my ratio , because popular files will not be uploaded fast because of too much seeders. This keep the trackers with news stuffs . I think uploading new torrents help, but it’s not always easy to find good stuff that that trackers don’t have already and that will be downloaded too. And when too much users share the torrent you post , you can stop it because you will not seed it fast.

Maybe you put some valuable files ,but they are not big . Users post great comments , but you will never see you ratio change because of the size. Maybe if the trackers see that this file is damn popular, it will be intelligent to boost your ratio even is the file is small. You have already the possibility to send ratio to others but the trackers can make it automatically too. It can be also work with users vote on the quality of the torrents or something like that.
Ratio will always be there , just to keep the activity level , but can be optimized.

if there was some way to make it so the faster pipes and slower pipes had the same chance of getting a good ratio that would be a better system. the way ti is the system favors people with the 10mbit and 100mbit seed servers or fiber optic while screwing the little guys out of their ratio.

My habits may be somewhat responsible for that, however. Typically, I’ll go online on a weekend, and load up a whole bunch of downloads, then leave uTorrent active for the rest of the week.

All my downloads eventually complete, and then sit there as seeds until they hit a 1.5 ratio, then I take them down.

Sometimes I dip below a 1 ratio for a while if I download a bunch of big torrents, but usually I’m up somewhere around a 1.6, which is more than fair and easy to maintain.

it’s not that hard lol

My ratios would eventually look better if I didn’t occassionally reboot or turn off bittorrent when I need more bandwidth. I think I’m a reasonable user that shares more than fair, but I won’t become a slave to ratio nazis.

In the long ago past, BBSs would refuse to let you download files until you’d uploaded a new file the same size or larger. The end result was lots of people uploading lots of garbage files with unique names just to get upload credit. It looks like a version of this is happening to the bittorrent world if people are talking about ratio cheating.

In my opinion, the problem isn’t the downloaders, it’s the ratio nazis.