Caltrops - Rants





	[quote name="Zseni: Warrior-Poet"][quote name="Fussbett"]They last longer only by the period enforced by the delay, though, which is 72 hours at most in Nazi Germanic places like audiofarm, and sometimes slap-on-the-wrist 12 hours. It does nothing for your 20-week-old torrent. [/quote] I think that's a little simplistic. A tracker that puts a value on participation encourages elitist pigs, and the top ten best sharer lists encourage competition for high ratios, and lots of other little things that combine to draw out the lifespan of torrents. [quote]The 20-week-old torrent is BT's weakness as a swarming protocol, and it's why eJackasses still exist, to fill that gap. The only way around old torrents is to have the thriving community where you can rely on communication and reseeds, as you mentioned. That's purely extracurricular icing on the cake and shouldn't be an expectation of BT. It's also only viable in the MP3 world, as in certain communities it's impractical to reseed old torrents, like in the case with 3 gig RARed ISOs or current TV shows. No one's keeping around RARs or episode 4 of Joey for archival purposes.[/quote] The longest-lasting torrents at ThePPN, kept seeded since their creation, were 4 GB of Ayumi Hamasaki mp3s split into subsections. When the tracker went down, they were over a year and a half old. Is that just mp3? Is it impractically large? Yes to both! <a href="http://www.boxtorrents.com/details.php?id=1">Or this year-old torrent</a> at Boxtorrents - Sailor Moon Classic in .rm format. If you're looking for impractically large, <a href="http://www.boxtorrents.com/details.php?id=28">the 11 GB Gundam Wing one isn't much younger.</a> I don't expect this sort of thing from every site, or every torrent, but I think you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater if you say that torrent longevity shouldn't be a concern. I maintain that it's just good manners to seed to a 1:1 ratio and hit-and-runners are being rude and thoughtless. [quote]I say you're asking BT to be something it's not, stretching it out unnaturally. I say play to the strengths rather than fight the tide like so much King Canute and/or salmon. The strengths are the speeds given by more peers, ease of use, and the stability of distributed copies and hash checking. So a site should do everything to get as many peers as possible, all the time, by removing obstructions. If this is happening, other problems are less promblematic as more people get the file faster, thus SEED EARLIER AND MAYBE LONGER (a hidden benefit no one thinks of), not to mention the chance of the first distributed copy appearing earlier, making seeds even less important. The file may have a short seed life (relative only to artificial life support seeds), but the file could be uploaded again later, couldn't it? After all, the maximum number of people snatched the file in the first place, so it got out there. SuprNova was a good example of this, things appearing multiple times. No one complained.[/quote] I say you're being too permissive and short-sighted. "The maximum number of people" is a puzzling and contextless figure. Furthermore, the idea that routine leechers would then upload a redundant torrent and seed it is a little shaky. Your system of ethics here might work if it were shared by everyone, but it's not shared by everyone. [quote]Sites discourage peers both through mandates and by accident. There was a site I registered for to get the Brown Bunny. It was a site specializing in art films and music. E-mail registration of course, lots to read, everything to slow me down -- including banning ports 6881-6889 (psh, <i>common</i> ports). Finally I got to the torrents and see 1 seed and 1 leecher on the 2-day-old Brown Bunny. Why doesn't the seed just e-mail the file instead?[/quote] HAHAHA YOU WANTED TO GET THE BROWN BUNNY. Don't give me any shit about you getting it just for the porn. Anyway Brown Bunny sucks, art film trackers are purely gay, but just yesterday I jumped on a formerly dead torrent that someone wanted to reseed, one seed, one peer, I downloaded it at 100 k/s. Why am I supposed to complain about this? Thank you seed! Thank you peer! It was for a server you had to register for and one with delays on torrents for bad ratios. Yes, registrations are gay, but I do feel they engender community for many small trackers, and the community can then support old torrents like the one I grabbed. When a community is large enough maybe they should drop the bars to entry. That Oink has opted instead to put up more pissing and moaning about leechers instead of letting everyone in is laziness and bad design - their forums are awful, the moderators are Nazis, I see RAY has been hard at work there. [/quote]