Private Ants P2P community

[lacitpo]

Alright, I have an idea I've been working up in my head. I've been keeping up with the ants project and I love it. I think everyone knows that file-sharing is going to move over to third generation clients and networks eventually and the sooner the better. We've seen sites like sharereactor and torrentbits and many many others go down over the last year. Many remain open, but it's only a matter of time.

What I'm thinking about is setting up an Ants community in the same way sharereactor, elitetorrents, and many other sites have done. Like any community, we would need an indexing site to host links to official releases, community forums, news, etc. This is the biggest problem because it would be the biggest bandwidth hog. Assuming that the server running the community page was on a decent dedicated server on a 100mbit line, what size community could one expect the server to be able to handle. I.E. how many users could once expect to be able to host off of that machine before getting bogged down.

I've been toying with the idea of a private community, but I do not see how once could keep the network partitioned like that. Even with a private IRC channel, you could not keep one client from joining both the private channel and a public channel, thus connecting the two networks.

The thing I like the most is having a solid ants community would help the overall ants network grow. I think uploaders with good connections would be drawn to a network that provides complete anonymity. I think even major releasers could eventually be swayed to publish there releases onto the ants network simply because there would be no need for them to aquire there own network of people to distribute there releases for them. We could see movies and TV shows releases strait onto a major P2P network.

I'd like to see what the filesharing community thinks of this idea.

[AussieMatt]

Hope you will host your community with the Ants Webserver then it is less likley your indexing site will get shut down

[lacitpo]

Thats what I'm hoping to be able to do. What I'm wondering is how much extra bandwidth running the page through ants will take up.

I'm going to be getting my dedicated server sometime mid april, but due to my money situation, it's going to be pretty low end. If I end up getting a community going with any decent size, I'm going to outgrow it quickly.

What sort of problems do you think I'll end up running into once the community gets larger and more http servers are on the network. Is there a way for people to bookmark a certain ants http page? If not, does anyone have any ideas for a solution to that problem.

[Malicious Intent]

If you are looking for other ways to distribute hashlinks, check out:
http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=715

There is also www.bt-gm.com, which uses irc to distribute torrent files.

[lacitpo]

Thats pretty freakin cool. I've been looking around, but I havn't been able to find a single open source module that indexes hash links. Most sites seem to have someone who has coded there own module. This project is getting bigger than I expected, but it would be great to build the foundation that helps ants grow like the ed2k network and other networks have.

I think an IRC bot could work out well, but I know just as little about IRC bots as I do about coding PHP.

[Malicious Intent]

I believe that www.sharelive.com has made their website open source, not sure how easy it would be to use with ANts.

[Abyss00]

It would be nice to have just one main Ants p2p community site instead of spread over a bunch of different general p2p forums the way it currently is.

[lacitpo]

doesn't ants take ed2k links. I thought I saw that somewhere

[lacitpo]

Alright, I'm in the process of getting the web-server up and running on my home computer. I'm using a CMS called Xoops, because I found a ED2K indexing module I think might work. I am also looking for a module I heard about for Postnuke, but with no success yet. If the xoops module turns out to be crap which I sort of think it is, I am going to just go with the best CMS I can find and use that till I can either get someone who is interested ot code a indexing module, or till sharelive's goes open-source.

Here is how I'm invisioning the community to be layed out. A lot of this will have to adjust itself as we see how the network can handle a large page being hosted through the ANTs http funtion.

All links would be hosted through Ants. Assuming Ants can be as anonymous as it says it can, this should keep the community fairly well protected. I think that eventually, if someone could code a version of ants that was designed to only host a web page over the ants network, the speed of the page would be largly increased, especially once the community grows. As far as the system used for indexing ants links, only time will tell. Any CMS we use that isn't designed for indexing links will have its shortcomings. I'm guessing that unless we're really lucky, any system that is coded for ED2K links will have to be modified to handle ants links. Either way, the community will need some people well versed in php, etc.

The community will need a site hosted regularly with community forums. I think hosting these sort of things through ants would be a waste of bandwidth. If possible, both the ants hosted site and the normally hosted site could possibly work in conjunction so that users could see what was out and released on the site, but would have to get the links via the ants hosted page. I think that the forums will have to be set up to not allow ants links except for maybe a very tightly monitored section where only legal content could be posted. This would keep the main site out of the sights of companies like the MPAA and RIAA. I also think that both sites would definately need to be on seperate servers. Even better would be to be sure that the indexing site was hosted in a country like switzerland that had lax copyrite laws.

As far as IRC goes, I think that there are a lot of things that can be done via IRC, but I'm not well enough versed in what can/can't be done via bots, etc to even start guessing. I think that IRC will be a great resource for establishing a clear community around. It will be an easy way for the community to really get together.

The thing I'm working on right now are experimenting with getting an indexing site running through Ants. Once I get a site up, I will need help testing it out. I'm also terrible at names, so if anyone has any good ideas as to what to name the site/community, feel free to chime in. :)

[infiniti]

You could use the code below to make ants2k:// links clickable like edonkey ones are in phpbb forums.

In you phpbb installation,

includes/bbcode.php

Find

function make_clickable($text)
{
   // pad it with a space so we can match things at the start of the 1st line.
   $ret = ' ' . $text;

After Add

// ants2k file links: (infiniti)
// ants2k://|file|fileName|fileSize|fileHash|

$ret = preg_replace("#(^|(?<=[^\w\"']))(ants2k://\|file\|([^\\/\|:<>\*\?\"]+?)\|(\d+?)\|([a-f0-9]{32})\|(.*?)/?)(?![\"'])(?=([,\.]*?[\s<\[])|[,\.]*?$)#i", "ants2k: <a href=\"\\2\">\\3</a>", $ret);

[lacitpo]

Infinity,

You seem like you know what you are doing pretty well with the coding aspects of stuff. Would you mind looking at this module I'm using

http://www.xoops.org/modules/reposit...id=28&lid=1366

Maybe point me in the right direction as to what I would need to do to recode it to take ants2k links :)

[lacitpo]

Site up, need input

Ok, I've got the site up and running finaly. Took me forever to get the PHP and SQL stuff worked out. Anyways, I've got the http server going in ants and I need to know if people can see the page and if people are able to register, login, etc.

I have a ED2K module installed on it right now. I am not sure if just substituting an Ants2k link instead of an ED2K link would work, but we'll find out.

[infiniti]

you might be better using Postnuke and a mod for it called dp_Elinks.

get PostNuke from there homesite.

you can get the edonkey link mod from http://www.dev-postnuke.com/index.php download the english language files for the module also as the primary language is spanish.

i looked at the xoops ed2k module and its well basic to say the least.