by wrinkler » 06 Jul 2012 20:06
I've been using Shareaza for a few years now and this has happened pretty much ever since then, along with downloads that never seem to finish that last 0.01% or so.
I think the real question that's being asked is what it will take to keep these things from happening in the first place? My G1, G2, and eDonkey caches shouldn't be vanishing into thin air with no in-built (and preferably automatic) way to get them back. If they're disappearing for a good reason, perhaps an alert needs to be generated to let the user know what he can do to stop it from happening, and then another thing to reset the cache and get everything back to the way it was.
I had been doing without G1 for a few weeks when it suddenly repopulated. No idea why. Then the new version comes out and I installed it a couple days ago and suddenly I have no G1 at all, from the moment I started, even though I did the cache reset in the install process. Had no G2 or edonkey caches either, but at least the edonkey had the option to download a .met file (which gives a tiny fraction of what I used to be able to get) and there were plenty of G2's available in the discovery area that G2 is now also working.
Which brings up another thing: what's with all the blocked discovery servers? What the hell were they before they were blocked? Why isn't the kind of server they are an innate part of their ID, and therefore why do I have to tell shareaza which of the three types it is (and have an excellent chance of being wrong)? And why were they blocked from the get-go? Spam? Then don't include them. Permanently down? Don't include them. Temporarily down, or status unknown? Don't block them, querry them once a week or so.
Do any of the servers on the download list actually have the last two bytes of the file I'm trying to download? Is it possible to ask? Is it possible to say "pretty please, I just need this last tiny bit and then my server will never bother your server again"? It would be nice to know inside a couple days whether or not a file will ever finish downloading, rather than having to wait several years, even with several hundred sources, none of which seem to be available to download from no matter how many weeks in a row I'm online.
Maybe I'm just talking out of my butt because I don't really understand what's going on under the hood, but I've been wondering these things for the last several years.