Torrents?

Jake1702

Ok, I'm sure this isn't the best place to post it, as it's like a "suggestion" rather than "offer" or "request". But on to my point, have you ever considered offering torrents for abandonware? I think it would be a good idea, as it would help lower bandwith requirements for hosting, and could also help some people download faster. Not sure if this has been suggested before, I couldn't seem to find anything on the topic. I apologise if for any reason I shouldn't post this for example if it has been suggested before or if you just do not want to offer torrents.

199x

In my opinion as long as the torrents are shared privately via PMs/email that should be fine as long as it meets abandonware requirements? There aren't many cases where I can see having a torrent would be beneficial in this site unless you were meaning to share privately with 1-2 people for whatever reason or for just a short period of time and not intended to be hosted on a mirror?

I knoooow Jake I forgot about that mainly because lately people's seeding speed for me has been pretty lame. I had one file @ 0.4/kb today. Woop.

Jake1702

199x wrote:

In my opinion as long as the torrents are shared privately via PMs/email that should be fine as long as it meets abandonware requirements? There aren't many cases where I can see having a torrent would be beneficial in this site unless you were meaning to share privately with 1-2 people for whatever reason or for just a short period of time and not intended to be hosted on a mirror?

The benefits of having torrents are a lot of users would be able to geet the downloads faster and if for any reason this site for example does not have enough funding to continue running at any point in the future, torrents could be used to keep the software available.

SomeGuy

Torrents are useless for small files of low interest. 5 minutes after the 4 interested people download it, it will disappear.

A torrent of a large bundle of small files is only useful for large "dead" archives, and only if sufficient people are interested in acquiring the entire freaking thing.

Plus, normal HTTP downloads should be 10000 times faster than a torrent because your ISP won't throttle it.

If you "offer" something up on the forum, it is better to use a file hosting service.

Jake1702

SomeGuy wrote:

Torrents are useless for small files of low interest. 5 minutes after the 4 interested people download it, it will disappear.

A torrent of a large bundle of small files is only useful for large "dead" archives, and only if sufficient people are interested in acquiring the entire freaking thing.

Plus, normal HTTP downloads should be 10000 times faster than a torrent because your ISP won't throttle it.
If you "offer" something up on the forum, it is better to use a file hosting service.

Ok, I agree, but maybe at least have torrents for the most popular and most downloaded files you have. Torrents can be a lot faster with enough seeders, and can make downloads on slower connections a bit faster.

stitch

I have pondered over the usage of BitTorrent on numerous occasions. I'll just state the following:

* Every download has a representation in our database which we can easily use to mass-create .torrent files.
* Most, if not all of the mirrors, could serve as seeds through cooperation with their respective owners and after evaluation of a good torrent client. There are numerous torrent clients on *nix that have substantial issues (looking at you, rTorrent).
* With respect to how this site operates and how the vast majority of our users are, they would download through the torrent and not seed after they have the full file. For anyone making the rationale that torrents will help the server costs, you're dead wrong on this, as the current set of mirrors would be handling the bulk of the data.

I'm not saying that this is specifically a bad idea, it just doesn't seem like the effort I would need to code in torrent support into the current WW codebase does not outweigh the benefit that could happen. The current HTTP system should be more than sufficient for the time being.

BOD

The only time torrents ever get seeded is when they're on pseudo pyramid scheme private trackers, and the OMG GIVE IT TO ME NOW NOW NOW mentality of a large portion of the downloaders here, I can't see this working whatsoever.