It’s much easier to share uncommon files with a Gnutella/Napster/Kazaa/eDonkey/SoulSeek-style “What folders do you want the world to see?” approach.

utorrent till i die!! =P

this works best on large, large swarms on public trackers (stfu to all you losers who rail against public trackers – being a real torrent user means knowing what is available, when, and where – including on public trackers, assholes.)

use azureus to kick-and-ban very low or non-sharing peers. azureus will only connect with a certain number of peers, and then usually stops looking for more, even if your ‘number of connections-per-torrent allowed’ is very high.

so, sort connectable peers by ‘total uploaded’ (or is it total downloaded? both, ironically, are counter-intuitive) and kick and ban the peers who haven’t uploaded you anything. there will always be about 10 or 15 upload-capping shit heads that you need to get rid of. then hit “update tracker” a few times, get some more peers and repeat. three or four times, and you should be connected to some of the best-sharing peers in the swarm.

Actually, it was Ernesto who was contacting developers to get feedback – I got an e-mail (though never got round to replying to it). No idea who else got it though.

Society moves forward by the number of activities it can perform without thinking (expending excess energy). The hacker manifesto states that redundancy is the enemy of progress/efficiency. Yea, you guys are the pioneers, capable of things that the mainstream can’t even understand, and we appreciate that…but not everyone needs to be a pioneer/expert. You play the role so that others don’t have to (and remember we play roles for you too).

In order for torrent tech to achieve it’s full potential and have a widespread impact (and I think we all agree it could be even more massive than it currently is) these programs have to be “user friendly”. What would it be like if we were all punching in letters on a command line instead of using an intuitive OS? Wouldn’t it be slow and frustrating? Somebody had to build that, to make it so that you didn’t HAVE to think about tasks that could be simplified. Right now we’re all involved in building something that we give to the next generation of computer users, whose abilities will probably embarrass ANY of ours by comparison.

So that’s my position. If I came off as an ass let me make clear that you guys are fantastic and on behalf of all noobs I thank you for being the early adopters and the experts. I’ve really got to get to sleep but thanks for the tips everybody, and I’m going to look into seedboxes. :)