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.

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! Or this year-old torrent at Boxtorrents - Sailor Moon Classic in .rm format. If you're looking for impractically large, the 11 GB Gundam Wing one isn't much younger.

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.

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.

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, common 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?

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.