BitTorrent users know that they have to maintain a favorable download:upload ratio on the private trackers lest they be banned. Getting banned isn’t just your problem, either, as some sites will also ban the person who invited you there in the first place. Not good. So why take into consideration how hard it is to actually on some of these sites&mash;back i the day, OiNK was damn near impossible to see on unless you left your BitTorrent app on 24/7/365—and come up with a new ratio method? One popular music tracker is toying with the idea.
This is how the method would play out.
Contribution watch is a system of making sure that you try your best to maintain an acceptable ratio during the times when your ratio is poor. This is done by granting credit for seeding and uploading, and taking it away for not seeding, downloading, and being warned.
Credits take the form of hours a user is allowed to not have his torrent client open and seeding for. A user with 36 hours of credit can leave his client off for up to 36 hours – however, if he leaves it off any longer, and his hours reach 0, his account will be disabled.
An hour of credit is taken off for every hour that a user spends not seeding, and is added for every 1 hour a user spends seeding – as such, it is possible for a user to turn his computer off for up to 12 hours a day and break even. Additionally, a user can gain 48 hours of credit by uploading a torrent that he has not uploaded before, and will lose credit by downloading torrents or having a torrent he’s uploaded deleted (the numbers here haven’t been decided yet).
Put my vote in the “no thanks” pile. The reason why I can’t leave my client open is simple: Time Warner totally destroys my connection when I try to seed. I mean, I’ll seed just fine (up to a max of about 60KB/s… whee!) but using a Web browser becomes impossible. If I have to keep Azureus open 24/7 I won’t be able to use the Internet at all. That wouldn’t be good.
Not that the system would affect me, since my ratio is about the 0.5 threshold. But I know how dificult it is to build up a ratio.
I don’t know, I’m all over the place here. I do like that people are coming up with alternatives, though.
Um, it’s probably not wise to link directly to the source post… It’s an OiNK replacement… ask your friends
Enjoy the Good Idea/Bad Idea video.