hello everyone.

I think everyone's looking forward to bearshare evolving. having said that, in this particular case i agree with the original poster: the IP block is no longer sufficient to deal with some of the features the network has developed in the last year or so. for instance, for the last 2 weeks i have been keeping an eye out for the performance of certain clients, it is my experience that those using Limewire and Swapnut have an extremely frustratingly high likelyhood to either freeze or drop transfers after 1 minute from the time of connection. i have a 7.2 Mb file which it seems is only owned by ONE gnutella user and I have been trying to download it for the last 10 days, so far I have 3.9 MB's worth - not due to bandwith limitations as the transfer speed is very high in the extremely rare cases where I can get a download slot and the remote servent does not simply stop sending or drop the connection. similarly, i am flooded with requests for certain files by Limewire and Swapnut users, which take away bandwidth and download slots from others simply to drop the connection or freeze between 45 seconds and a minute from the start of the transfer. This happens to a lesser degree with Gnotella and does not happen with Bearshare/Gnucleus/Gnut/(other) servents and with people on all kinds of networks and providers. let's not even go into the subject of web-based downloads which just about everyone hates. i have in fact tried out both Limewire and Swapnut in the last week, they are obviously targeted at inexperienced users and while cute and easy to set-up and run, they lack features and are slow and ponderous beasts. i have also tried gnucleus and i run gnut on my gnu/linux box, they are excellent clients which have what you (rightly) call mass blocking features, you don't have to implement these measures if you don't need them, but are there if you truly feel they are required. as of yesterday i have now modified gnut to reject all connections from Limewire and Swapnut, but unfortunately cannot do the same with Bearshare. as for file exclusion lists and range/domain blocking, the real question is 'why NOT have them?'. most people will never use them or know they are there, but those that truly need them will abandon Bearshare for Gnucleus so they can get them or make their own mods to the servent. i am sure that is also undesirable to Bearshare.

does anybody else share my frustration with Limewire and Swapnut ? if so let the developers know how you feel so they either sort out the affected -features- in their servents or become aware that they will be blacklisted by a growing number of alternative servents users.

thanks for your time.
neil