Shareaza

Please, someone tell me: is there anything I can to to get a proper, stable connection to G1 and force it to stay fully connected? Today I can't seem to get it to spend any length of time with more than one ultrapeer connected. Any 2nd, 3rd, or 4th connection to G1 lasts about as long as the proverbial snowball in hell. That's when it manages to establish any others at all. It both has a very high rate of failure establishing connections, and a very short average connection lifetime. This poor quality is simply unacceptable. Is there any setting change I can make that will make the connection to G1 something at least vaguely resembling stable???

And second: the long term chart over at crawler.doxu.org shows G2 strong up until 2012, and then entering what looks like an exponential decay in network size that has been ongoing for over two years now. What is the cause of this, and has anyone researched how to reverse it and get G2 back to normal again?

If both G1 and G2 become unusable, the former by becoming too unstable to be useful and the latter by becoming too small to be useful, there will no longer be any decent way to search for and get many smaller files, for example pictures and music. Every other P2P system seems to be geared toward larger files and has (unreliable, often ad- or even malware-ridden) web sites as the search interface (*cough*BitTorrent*cough*), and to be balkanized, so there's no global search that, if a file exists that that protocol can download, a single search will find it.

As for non-P2P, the only real alternative is the web, which is much less suited to just search, find, right click, download, as one must navigate a thicket of links and ads and is prone to run across obstacles if Javashit is disabled, obstacles that often seem to be intentionally put there by website owners just to be a jackass to people who take the security of their computers seriously. And no web browser deals nearly as nicely with managing significant numbers of simultaneous downloads, including resumption of interrupted downloads and the like, as Shareaza does. And, of course, Shareaza's library and "files you have already" filter makes avoiding downloading the same thing twice a cinch. Web browsers try to keep track of visited vs. unvisited links, but don't do a great job, are further crippled by websites that insist on using stylesheets that don't color the two differently, and have short memories sometimes.

So:

Is there a way to fix my connection to G1?

Is there a way to fix G2, which seems to have problems beyond what might be addressed by settings changes at my end?

Is there a viable alternative to the two Gnutellas that has all of these killer features:

- Sharers of content can't advertise, hack you or crash your browser with dodgy scripts, etc. (other than by falsely labeling files)

- Easy to globally search for files of a specific type matching something

- Easy to download results, without a lot of manual pointer-chasing per result first. Even to hoover up big sets of results, like dozens or even hundreds of relevant files.

- Easy to track results you've seen before/already downloaded and avoid duplications

- Good download management, progress indication, resumption of interrupted downloads, etc.

- In other words, basically works the same way as using a gnutella client: search, download, manage library all in one place, and streamlined.

I agree that the G1 and G2 networks are having an existential threat by just stagnating over these last few years (since 2007 and onwards to be honest). I don't think G1 is salvageable since too many of the clients are now owned and operated by SPAM corporations and there ilk plus Shareaza does not have a good controlling stake of revising, updating or safeguarding the G1 network since the specs are not within the overview of these Shareaza coders. I can't possibly connect to G1 anymore; it is highly unstable at this point and doesn't have any value added benefit for still supporting that network aside the fact that it is Shareaza's heritage/ pedigree since it was first a G1 client. I am of the mindset that for 2015 and onwards it would be better to remove redundant networks like (G1 and eD2k). and refocus on modernizing G2.

I suspect G2 has shrunk in population because Shareaza gave too many networks but really didn't master one ... this has lead some to leave for example to use the eD2k service better it is more apparent to switch to eMule then to stay with Shareaza ... also the same for BitTorrent. Also coder neglect ... a small development community with such a large task of corralling 4-5 networks/ services is nearly impossible. Inevitably you get coder neglect wherein certain areas get attention (ie. areas of coder strength, pet projects, etc...) and other areas aren't really even looked at. Shareaza also requires constant tweaking for high performance right after installation something not everybody is too keen on. Lastly P2P has changed since the inception of G2. You are correct in the assessment that P2P is now more oriented towards larger files and the current P2P players are not so good at finding and sharing smaller files. I suspect this is a trend that will remain for the foreseeable future and we have now left the era of pictures and gone towards the era of moving pictures at much higher resolutions. Today Netflix and Youtube are the biggest data users on the net. So Shareaza does have a niche market to play to ... but more and more I see that small files (if they are popular) are still easier to find using the big file oriented P2P networks then it is to use Shareaza because it has a dwindling userbase and no file comments.

So I reiterate; keep G2, and BT but dump G1, and eD2k (Your stuck in a Queue the remainder of the download while they just fill your upload queue it is an unfair network to G2 and should be removed). DC++ is the sort of useful since it feeds files into G2 and most DC++ users share a lot and keep large amounts of downloadable content also add Usenet so that Shareaza gets files into the G2 network before BitTorrent. I think this can refocus the coder and fix many underlying bugs just by removing legacy support for two networks that are heavily intertwined with G2. People don't come to Shareaza to use it for its outstanding G1 and eD2k capabilities they come for G2 ... and these two networks have been killing G2 since day one.

ED2K is where I find an increasingly large percentage of files I want. It would be a terrible idea to drop support for it. There's a grave risk that doing that results in a) no more files from ED2K and b) sufficiently little revitalization of G2 that the increase in files from G2, if any, does not come close to compensating.

I seriously doubt that ED2K support in Shareaza is somehow killing G2. Especially since if someone is using Shareaza, rather than a single-protocol emule client, they're pretty much certainly using G2. I think G2 is suffering from several perhaps-unrelated problems that collectively diminish adoption, every one of which the Shareaza dev team has the capability to fix or at least ameliorate.

1. The whole "Shareaza gets stuck bouncing off the GFW until manual hostcache reset" problem. That's a pain in the ass for users who know how to resolve it, and it damages Shareaza's usefulness in a "start it, start a search, and do something else for a long time" scenario, as if it suffers a connection loss to G2 while unattended it often won't recover on its own. I have already posted exact patch code to correct this, but it has yet to be incorporated into the repository, let alone a released version.

2. G2's flagship client is Shareaza, and the overwhelming number of G2 users are using it; so there's a monoculture/G2's eggs all in one basket problem. Something makes G2 development unattractive to outside developers. Shareaza's dev team is, so far as I am aware, the gatekeeper to the G2 wire protocol specification. Perhaps there is something they are doing wrong, or not doing, that is inhibiting wider adoption of the protocol and the emergence of a greater diversity of G2 clients. Meanwhile, any serious problems for Shareaza are serious problems for G2.

3. Shareaza is bedeviled by phonies that bear the same name. A change of name, followed by aggressive trademark enforcement, would be a good idea. I understand why a change of name was not done when the "shareaza.com" debacle occurred, as at that time Shareaza had big mind-share and a change of name would have badly hurt the brand. But now Shareaza languishes in obscurity, so a name change will help much more than it will hurt. It is past time to revisit that idea.

4. Shareaza development has slowed down to a snail's pace, which is probably making it unattractive to new users. Bugs go unfixed for years, even when complaints about them keep pouring in. The blind overwriting of same-name files in the download folder, a regression intruduced most of a decade ago and reported monthly since, has not been fixed, or even turned into an option, overwrite files vs. rename to avoid overwrites, that users can set according to individual preference. Adding such an option would probably be a five minute job for someone already familiar with the codebase but nothing gets done. Shareaza needs to attract more developers, or else to get more attention from its existing ones. I'd contribute myself except that I don't have Microsoft Visual C++ or any of the other development tools used by this project, as my own work is mainly in Java these days and Microsoft's products are quite expensive and come complete with a wallet-draining upgrade treadmill.

5. Shareaza has a number of other warts that inhibit adoption. No modern forms of NAT traversal, various freezes and hangs, lack of kad support, lack of protocol obfuscation, does not readily interoperate with anonymity tools ...

View -> Power Mode

Then go to Tools -> Shareaza Settings... -> Gnutella submenu on the left and set the G1 to:

3-5
50
32

It seems that G1 refuses to be connected or even to connect if these values are too low. And default settings seem to be low. I have G1 connected fine with such settings. Not really sure if there is much stuff on G1 anyway, majority seems to come off G2 and ED2K. I wish they'd finally add KAD to Shareaza as well...