Before the confusion & misunderstanding at the start of the thread, (get my breath back lol ), there's a lot of people who find browsing a very important tool. Some misunderstand it. The browse tool is not perfect. I've browsed someone i was downlding from but even though the browse search completed with the search tab still up (not stop b/c they were not online or not browsable at that particular moment), there were zero results. This has happened many times. Yet these people are obviously sharing. The same applies to those who are uplding from me. Sometimes you can browse them & sometimes they give zero results (when they have the chat icon visible). But this doesn't necessarily mean they aren't sharing.

I use browse very, very frequently! I may browse someone & then browse the multiple results in the browse b/c I'm looking for particular files or hard to get files. And if these other people have similar then they may share what I'm looking for. If the browse function was taken away or limited even more from what it is then it would take away my abilities to find what i'm looking for & my general techniques for searching for particular material.

I respect some people may want to have some files they wish to keep private for just a certain group of people to share with. Perhaps a group of friends for example. This ability gives some people more confidence with their security with what they share. But at the same time, I believe that for the others who may desire the same files, they are out of the loop & will unnecessarily miss out at no fault of their own. So will that deteriorate the general accessibility of files to the general user. It certainly could.

So how do you balance it?