Share 2 Share?

I’ve been using file swapping software for a very long time, and would like to think that I have used most of the best. However, it’s only in recent times when I’ve been searching for some rarer files on modern networks that I’ve started to get a little bit angry.

 
I’m on broadband, and whenever I’m downloading on the WinMX or Fasttrack networks I always have 5 upload slots available on each. From looking at WinMX it seems everyone has at least one slot open, so that’s probably not too bad. On reflection, the success rate on WinMX *seems* to be slightly higher than on Fasttrack right now.

 
However, in KaZaAlite (and I assume KaZaA also? It’s so long since I’ve used their horribly ad-mutated software that I can’t remember) you can completely disable sharing. The result is a huge volume of leeching users filling up all my slots that I would rather be filled by sharing users.

 
The solution, in my eyes, could be one of two things. The first would be to force all P2P users to have identical sharing and download directories, so *supposedly* files are always available for upload – combined with forced upload slots. The second would be to allow sharing users to block other users sharing less than a certain amount of content and/or with too few upload slots.

 
Over recent months I’ve noticed Fasttrack P2P becoming 99% leeching peers to 1% sharing peers (slight exag.) I was supprised by WinMX, which performed much better than I had expected, but the problem seems to have mutated into “trading” where I have to bump users up my own uploading queue in order to download the files I want. As for the Gnutella clients that I’ve tried… well put it like this, I’ve found more useful content on beer mats.

 
There are probably a lot of 56k users, and others who treasure their bandwidth to stupid extents, out there who will slam this article, but as the P2P services seem to be crumbling, maybe we should be doing more to keep people sharing on the services we have?

 
Anon.

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