[DavidXanatos]

Surprise the world is not fair and you will never build a long therm stable society (or P2P network) based on fairness alone, you need also equality, that is give from them who have much more than the average to the rest.

The issue here is that for fairness alone to be sufficient you would at least need everyone to start out with exactly the same starting conditions.
That is never possible in the real world and those also not in the Internet.

BT embraces this fact by its egalitarian upload policy without a Queue or CS.

> But in reality all attempts to design better CS failed so far.
Cause the sollution would be to drop the CSand Queue.

This post has been edited by DavidXanatos: 18 March 2015 - 08:04 PM

[inman]

I accept that you will never get a totally fair system. However, there is not much motivation for those with fast upload to keep uploading, especially when compared with Torrents.
As I said, to get the most out of Emule you must run it for several days. Leaving it running for several days (especially with a fast upload) has an adverse effect on who you upload to. After a while, the user has uploaded to all those with good credit & left with mostly the users with poorer credit scores. You must keep it running to jump the queue, but the longer and longer you run it, the less and less likely you are to get something in return (you are left uploading to all the poor users). Of course, some new users with good credits can come online but, as time is such an important factor as well, they will be lower in your queue.
Go private with torrents and leave it running for ages, and you will get rewarded guaranteed (as long as you keep your ratio). Not always true with Emule.

[fox88]

inman, on 19 March 2015 - 12:05 AM, said:

As I said, to get the most out of Emule you must run it for several days.

Generally speaking the pharse is rather meaningless even though you said it. Note, that again you are talking about to get, not to share.

inman, on 19 March 2015 - 12:05 AM, said:

Leaving it running for several days (especially with a fast upload) has an adverse effect on who you upload to.

Are we joking wildly again? This time about horrible adverse effect.

inman, on 19 March 2015 - 12:05 AM, said:

After a while, the user has uploaded to all those with good credit & left with mostly the users with poorer credit scores.

Again you exaggerate infulence of CS. The problem is in available upload capacity, not in credits. And in those smart users who want to get, but not to give back.

inman, on 19 March 2015 - 12:05 AM, said:

Go private with torrents and leave it running for ages, and you will get rewarded guaranteed (as long as you keep your ratio).

What a sweet mix: miserly elitism.
My purpose is to get contents I want, you might enjoy keeping ratio.
Also I dislike the idea of splitting internet into tiny closed societies.

inman, on 19 March 2015 - 12:05 AM, said:

Not always true with Emule.

You are talking about instant karma while forgetting about long term effects.
For your information:
1) studies showed that most new contents is added into the net by a minority of users;
2) studies showed that traffic in P2P is mostly generated by minority with high bandwidth capacities.
If releasers decide they do not get enough payback, I'm afraid you will never find anything interesting in the net.

This post has been edited by fox88: 19 March 2015 - 08:38 AM

[inman]

fox88, on 19 March 2015 - 08:37 AM, said:

Generally speaking the pharse is rather meaningless even though you said it. Note, that again you are talking about to get, not to share.

So, given this quote from you,"my purpose is to get contents I want, you might enjoy keeping ratio" you also want to get and not to share like 99.5% of all file-sharers? The original question was 'have people moved onto other forms of P2P?' Torrents, public ones at least, are for getting and not for sharing.

I estimate I have uploaded 15-20TB during my 10+ years of using Emule & Edonkey2000, by the way. Most of this uploaded data I obtained from Usenet, IRC, DC++, Torrents & file hosting services and bought onto the ED2k network, purely out of kindness. I could have gotten the files that were only available on Emule faster by only downloading them, as I would have gained better credit scores from all my co-downloaders, and not sharing new files on the network to users I would likely see again. Again, little motivation with Emule to share new files obtained from elsewhere. Again, Torrents gets around this with a upload to download ratio.

inman, on 19 March 2015 - 12:05 AM, said:

Leaving it running for several days (especially with a fast upload) has an adverse effect on who you upload to.
Are we joking wildly again? This time about horrible adverse effect.

Bare in mind I have an upload speed that fluctuates between 1100 kb/s and 1600 kb/s, depending on how generous I feel (although I rarely max it out as it slows downloads). After a while, all the good users are finished as they are higher in my queue. I am unfavourably left uploading to all the slower up-loaders & freeloaders, so yes it is an adverse effect. I gain little to no advantage by uploading anything to unfavourable users.

Quote

Again you exaggerate infulence of CS. The problem is in available upload capacity, not in credits. And in those smart users who want to get, but not to give back.

Most users are filtered down to those with greater upload capacity yes, agreed. As I said, the CS worked better on an even playing field before the great speeds offered by ISPs to a lot of Emule users in Western Europe. So why persist with it? Keep in mind, the geography of the majority of Emule users: Either 1) Western Europe OR 2) East Asia & Israel or 3) South America. There is a big contrast in download and upload capacities between those 3 places. Keep in mind also, the peerates stats on this are inaccurate because many of the Chinese users with bad mods are Kad only.

Quote

If releasers decide they do not get enough payback, I'm afraid you will never find anything interesting in the net.

We are getting a bit off-topic, but most of what is leaked to the net is done by those with scene access, who get no payback by leaking it to the public. P2P releasers are simply the 'middle men' who obtain the leaked releases, from wherever it got leaked to , and share it with the rest of the P2P community. Which P2P application offers most payback for being the middle man? I'll give you a clue, it's not Emule.

This post has been edited by inman: 19 March 2015 - 01:38 PM

[DavidXanatos]

The purpose of almost all users of P2P software is to "get Content" sharing is a by product or something you do if you are in a good mood.

Thats why torrent is so successful, it does not force any one to share yet still manages to get enough upload bandwidth to satisfy all downloaders.

eMule should do the same.

I really is time to scrap the CS / queue and stop trying to influence user behavior.

David X.

[tHeWiZaRdOfDoS]

I think you should really stop comparing eMule to BT - it's like apples and oranges - both taste great but everybody has their favourite among them.
For me, BT never was an alternative because I am not into "mainstream". Granted, BT does a decent job there which is fine and explainable because people won't share hundreds and thousands of files via BT but only the most recent ones to a) download them and up their ratio so they can stay on their favourite tracker(s).
Try getting old stuff... no way via BT. Granted, it takes ages via eMule, but at least you will - eventually - get it!

Sure, eMule would need some improvements regarding download speed but that isn't easily achievable... and I highly doubt that the "first come, first serve" concept will work for eMule.
I think the upload improvements were a very necessary step - next they should improve per slot upload (i.e. focus) and/or implement SCT because users can only share complete chunks (SCT: blocks) and we should try to get them into "sharing" status ASAP.

[niRRity]

I don't think the CS or queue system are the issues that hold eMule back. I don't think that speed of download is emule's main issue at all. eMule is not as fast as BT but it works fine. The thing that make most users choose BT over eMule is simplicity.

What is frustrating me personally is that eMule is so close to being an amazing and approachable P2P client but the devs (which I respect tremendously) won't make the tweaks.

If eMule would embrace a simpler user interface, be more correctly configured out-of-the-box and solve some minor issues it would be a lot more popular.

This client/network really has a lot to offer over BT, too bad it's stuck on the geekware phase.

[inman]

tHeWiZaRdOfDoS, on 20 March 2015 - 11:10 AM, said:

I think you should really stop comparing eMule to BT - it's like apples and oranges - both taste great but everybody has their favourite among them.
For me, BT never was an alternative because I am not into "mainstream". Granted, BT does a decent job there which is fine and explainable because people won't share hundreds and thousands of files via BT but only the most recent ones to a) download them and up their ratio so they can stay on their favourite tracker(s).

Even compared with other P2P like DC++ I think Emule is inferior in some ways.
You mentioned you can share 100s & 1000s of files but, from my experience, you can't do this without Emule being prone to crashing & freezing, and you still have the limits of files shared by Kad and the servers. On DC++ I find you can hash unlimited files without the program crashing.
If you were to compare queue systems, on DC++ on quick reboot & you'll most likely retain good download & upload speeds (to those same users you were uploading to before the reboot) and retain your place in the queue. In Emule, it can take many hours to get speeds up and any reboot can obviously cause you to drop many places down the queues.

Quote

Try getting old stuff... no way via BT. Granted, it takes ages via eMule, but at least you will - eventually - get it!

The only good factors with Emule are:
A) Popular files last forever in the network (although you could counter argue by saying a lot of popular files are nasty material disguised and renamed to 100s of different files in different languages.)
B ) Easy resharing of files from elsewhere thanks to the hash system. DC++ has a similar hash system but is not as effective, as it is limited to that hub or you must "search for alternatives" (and that is still only limited to the hubs you're connected to.) In Emule you can easily reshare a file to the whole network.
C) The search system searches the whole network. Again with Dc++ the search is limited to the hubs you're connected to. With torrents, you can search for old material but they are much harder to find as they are often privatized.

[DavidXanatos]

tHeWiZaRdOfDoS, on 20 March 2015 - 11:10 AM, said:

I think you should really stop comparing eMule to BT - it's like apples and oranges

Well but from the user perspective booth are the same its more like comparing oranges and clementines, booth are used to made suite orange colored juice

Booth applications serve roughly the same purpose, download stuff of the web in a P2P way.

tHeWiZaRdOfDoS, on 20 March 2015 - 11:10 AM, said:

Granted, BT does a decent job there which is fine and explainable because people won't share hundreds and thousands of files via BT but only the most recent ones to a) download them

Agreed.

tHeWiZaRdOfDoS, on 20 March 2015 - 11:10 AM, said:

and up their ratio so they can stay on their favourite tracker(s).

I totally disagree, most BT users use public trackers or DHT only. Almost no BT user is caring in any way about his ratio, upload is a mare side effect.

Quote

Try getting old stuff... no way via BT. Granted, it takes ages via eMule, but at least you will - eventually - get it!

This may have been true half a decade ago, but it certainly is not true today,
you can find old stuff on various torrent sites with still a few seeds alive and if you do you can download it in a few hours to days (later in case of this 100GB torrents).
With eMule if you find something with only a few sources of a significant size you will be downloading it for years. That is effectively never.
What good is to have some old files that no one will ever finish downloading due to the bad upload strategy?

In the last years i got much more old stuff from BT than from eMule,
you can get almost any old free tv show as a all seasons torrent in a few days max.
try doing that with eMule, today you will fail.

Yes ofcause a decade ago if you wanted all seasons of some free tv show eMule with some link site or even only the search was the way to go, and after a few months of sucking you head your "memorys" Storred on HDD for re enjoyment.

But in my experience this is simple not true today anymore, BT advanced a lot in therms of content availability and eMule lost a lot due to user lost and now BT dominates in speed as well as availability.


@niRRity
As of the UI tweaks you are right emule needs some modernization there.

But lets be honest what is the first thing a user cares when starting a new content sucking application, speed of download.
If eMule sucks to slow in comparation to some other tool, for the user the most important attribute is the sucking speed, the faster a application sucks the better it is. Everything else is secondary.
So before everything we need to speed up the download experience, and this requiters the queue and CS to be dropped.


David X.

PS: @All please excuse my often use of the work Sucking but in German thats a expression used for downloading and is not obscene at all, and I found it funny to use it in English as a literary translation

[fox88]

inman, on 19 March 2015 - 04:36 PM, said:

So, given this quote from you

Too bad the quote was used without context: I do not want to go to restricted or private trackers.
I get what I need in the whole net and share it too.

inman, on 19 March 2015 - 04:36 PM, said:

I estimate I have uploaded 15-20TB during my 10+ years of using Emule & Edonkey2000, by the way.

You could do a lot better without sacrifices (assuming that you pay for connection speed, not for the actual amount of traffic).

inman, on 19 March 2015 - 04:36 PM, said:

purely out of kindness.

That means, you are permanently counting how many credits were earned but wasted.
Did you ever learn that maxing upload is very bad idea?

Why don't you try to forget about credits? Slow connections cannot be fixed or changed by credits.
Try to concentrate on a simple thought instead: share as much as you can and other could do that too.
Then you might hope that people will like the place and stay.

inman, on 19 March 2015 - 04:36 PM, said:

Bare in mind

inman, on 19 March 2015 - 04:36 PM, said:

so yes it is an adverse effect.

I got it: in your opinion slow connections are evil, because payback is too low for your refined connection.

inman, on 19 March 2015 - 04:36 PM, said:

Most users are filtered down to those with greater upload capacity yes, agreed.

Sorry, you agreed with yourself?
Queue moves as fast as uploader can service it, and CS can slightly reorder the queue - whatever are up and down speeds of downloaders.
Slow connection itself is already a diasdvantage; and you would like to punish them even more.

inman, on 19 March 2015 - 04:36 PM, said:

As I said, the CS worked better on an even playing field before the great speeds offered by ISPs

That is not true. There were phone modem users, there were ADSL users with very different speeds, and there were cable connection with various speeds.

inman, on 19 March 2015 - 04:36 PM, said:

Keep in mind also, the peerates stats on this are inaccurate because many of the Chinese users with bad mods are Kad only.

Why I should keep that in mind? The link I gave you above had nothing to do with eMule or KAD.

inman, on 19 March 2015 - 04:36 PM, said:

We are getting a bit off-topic

Not at all. Do you think releasers care about credits as much as you do, when uploading to anybody in the net?

This post has been edited by fox88: 21 March 2015 - 05:55 PM

[DJ_MELERIX]

the main reasons about why common prople still prefer use others P2P clients and not eMule ? is due the evolution of software...

- more user friendly UI than before.
- automatically connected by default.
- more efficient queue system.
- ports managed with UPNP by default.
- encrypted protocol by default.
- more fast updates.

This post has been edited by DJ_MELERIX: 22 March 2015 - 12:33 AM

[hooligan3000]

im a really hard uploader and i dont care of any credits.
i want to spread fast my files and my clients want to load fast.
thats all.

[niRRity]

DavidXanatos, on 20 March 2015 - 04:26 PM, said:

@niRRity
But lets be honest what is the first thing a user cares when starting a new content sucking application, speed of download.
If eMule sucks to slow in comparation to some other tool, for the user the most important attribute is the sucking speed, the faster a application sucks the better it is. Everything else is secondary.
So before everything we need to speed up the download experience, and this requiters the queue and CS to be dropped.

Not sure I agree with that. I think most users won't care whether they download at their full bandwidth or at 50% bandwidth as long as the client is simple and easy to use. Don't forget that emule has some inherit advantages over BT - mostly the fact it is searchable and don't relay on torrent sites but also the richer content and the fact it's open source.

I think that if the UI would be simplified, the initial setup would be hassle free and the search function streamlined the fact that emule is slower then BT won't really bother most users.

This post has been edited by niRRity: 24 March 2015 - 02:16 PM

[fox88]

niRRity, on 24 March 2015 - 01:27 PM, said:

the fact it's open source.

There are good open source BT clients, so this hardly is an advantage now; while worldwide searching capability definitely is.

This post has been edited by fox88: 24 March 2015 - 02:17 PM

[Some Support]

niRRity, on 24 March 2015 - 10:27 AM, said:

the search function streamlined

Just wonder, what is there to streamline? There is one field to enter the search keyword and you hit enter to search. Everything else are just additional options.

As for the GUI: Well there is a client which tried to do excactly that (although it violates the GPL and was made for the money): easymule in china. It hides everything from the users to get a really simple interface. I personally don't like it. And I'm not sure if it should be the goal for eMule to attract the one-click download crowd rather than enthusasts. I'm not saying the GUI can't be improved or that eMule should be hard to use, but I'm not convinced that the GUI should be simplified on the cost of options and features.

[tHeWiZaRdOfDoS]

@Some Support: a first step would be to hide some rarely (never!) used options from GUI and changing some defaults. See kMule for example (sorry for advertising ) where we tried to do that while still keeping all functionality or even enhancing it.
I helped someone to set up eMule just yesterday and it requires way too much work until it works correctly (connect on startup disabled, no proper server.met/nodes.dat in Installer, some confusing options like SUI etc. etc.)

Oh and while we are at it, I still think the upload mechanism should be changed to focused upload, or use a formula like
"If one chunk needs more than X (5? 10?) minutes to upload, use slot focus, otherwise, stay with balanced upload"
To increase file spread, availability and - last but not least - download speed.

[Some Support]

tHeWiZaRdOfDoS, on 25 March 2015 - 09:48 AM, said:

connect on startup disabled, no proper server.met/nodes.dat in Installer

Connecting is one click away, I don't think that is a big issue. What I do agree is that it's complicated without a working nodes.dat and server.met (there are proper ones in the installer, but they are usually outdated after a month). That really requires some work. But unfortunatly it's not a problem easy to fix. The only solution is providing it from a central server - which we would have to run and we don't really want this. It also makes eMule weaker once this central server disappears.

I'm not really sure how to fix this. The best solution would be obviously if there were several other websites which offer such a service - eMule already has the mechanism for creating and more importantly using bootstrap nodes.dat files which work fine even when spread to a big number of users (the ones we put into our installers). But there isn't much in for doing this, so it's not too likely to happen.

[fox88]

Some Support, on 25 March 2015 - 08:21 PM, said:

they are usually outdated after a month

About old files.
Very long ago I posted this: http://forum.emule-p...howtopic=156037
My current code is:

else if (uContactVersion > 1) // only kad2 nodes
{
	//use all nodes from file to give chances to connect with very old nodes.dat
	//nodes are ordered by distance from our own ID (provides randomness between different users and hass good chances to get a bootstrap with close Nodes which is a nice start for our routing table) 
	CUInt128 uDistance = uMe;
	uDistance.Xor(uID);
	uValidContacts++;
	// look were to put this contact into the proper position
	bool bInserted = false;
	CContact* pContact = new CContact(uID, uIP, uUDPPort, uTCPPort, uMe, uContactVersion, 0, false);
	for (POSITION pos1 = CKademlia::s_liBootstapList.GetHeadPosition(); pos1 != NULL;) {
		POSITION pos2 = pos1;
		if (CKademlia::s_liBootstapList.GetNext(pos1)->GetDistance() > uDistance) {
			CKademlia::s_liBootstapList.InsertBefore(pos2, pContact);
			bInserted = true;
			break;
		}
	}
	if (!bInserted)
		CKademlia::s_liBootstapList.AddTail(pContact);
}

Is there anything wrong with this idea?

This post has been edited by fox88: 25 March 2015 - 06:29 PM

[tHeWiZaRdOfDoS]

Some Support, on 25 March 2015 - 07:21 PM, said:

Connecting is one click away, I don't think that is a big issue.

I have to disapprove that answer... just imagine todays "default user":
Starting eMule and fiddling with the wizard
Doing a search
Getting no results, i.e. message box telling he isn't connected
Deleting eMule

Todays users - while I don't think that that behavior is good! - expects everything to work out-of-the-box. The average user is not like us who grew up with a C16, typing pages of code from magazines, etc.
TBH, the "connect/disconnect" button could be removed completely as it doesn't make sense to 99.99% of the users. They start eMule to use it (which you cannot without connection) and close it if they don't want to use it. Did you see any other widely spread downloading software that requires you to hit an additional button to get started?

Quote

What I do agree is that it's complicated without a working nodes.dat and server.met (there are proper ones in the installer, but they are usually outdated after a month). That really requires some work. But unfortunatly it's not a problem easy to fix. The only solution is providing it from a central server - which we would have to run and we don't really want this. It also makes eMule weaker once this central server disappears.

I'm not really sure how to fix this. The best solution would be obviously if there were several other websites which offer such a service - eMule already has the mechanism for creating and more importantly using bootstrap nodes.dat files which work fine even when spread to a big number of users (the ones we put into our installers). But there isn't much in for doing this, so it's not too likely to happen.

Of course you are right about the dependence and it's OK if you reject that idea BUT... in which case would we need to access that server(s)?
Only in case we have no valid data, yet (i.e. new install or very long timeout) - do you think that would happen THAT often? Any idea how many "new installs" there are?
Oh and even IF we rely on a server and that central server(s) is(are) gone... it would just be the same situation as we already HAVE right now


EDiT: oh, what about upload changes?

This post has been edited by tHeWiZaRdOfDoS: 25 March 2015 - 07:16 PM

[niRRity]

@Some Support
The answers to your questions are right in front of you. Look at the interfaces of successful P2P clients and websites and you will see what I mean. uTorrent has no connect button, no server list, no message tab and no nonsense. You might say that these things are optional and the user can ignore them but that's not how UI works IMO. The clutter of unimportant stuff makes it harder for the user to focus on the important things. eMule UI should have a transfer page, a search page and a library as main pages. everything else should be accesses by submenu or the status bar (options, statistics, connection status etc.). And the search page should look like a search page on a torrent site, one big search box with an advance search function. search results should be automatically sorted by availability or a more intelligent sort algorithm and a fake detection system should be implemented.

Also the client should be more well configured out of the box and not relay on the user to configure it correctly.