I'm definitely in favor of creating a Shareaza forum. We’ve received some terrific support from many generous individuals and sites, but overall it’s been very difficult to promote Shareaza widely. Most of the sites listing Gnutella clients do not list Shareaza. It just goes to show that offering cutting edge technology is only the first step, and doesn’t do much good unless people know about it!

I’ve read most of the comments here and really appreciate the support you guys have given Shareaza. I’ve also seen some questions raised about whether it “plays fair” with the Gnutella network, etc, and so I plan to write a good technically-minded response to that soon. Rest assured that Shareaza plays very fair indeed.

In fact unlike many Gnutella clients, Shareaza does not discriminate in any part of its operations. It does not employ “friendly vendor clustering”, proprietary handshakes, selective search responses or download favoritism. Nor does it use any aspect of the Gnutella protocol to produce an unfair (and disruptive) advantage for users. Shareaza requeries only when specifically requested by the user, or when looking for a specific file (which uses a highly specific SHA1 search, and is still throttled to avoid excessive load). It also goes to reasonable lengths to clean up network traffic if it is performing a routing role (traditional node or Ultrapeer) by filtering packets, prioritizing transmissions, decoding and re-encoding to ensure standard compliance, etc.

The advantage you get by using Shareaza comes from its efforts to squeeze the most out of the Gnutella protocol and all its vendor-specific variations, not abusing the network with selfish traffic. The high performance of searches in Shareaza are a result of its ability to work with and understand several competing data formats promoted by different Gnutella vendors, all in a unified manner. Rather than just supporting its own features and standards, it’s built to understand everyone else’s as well, so you basically get the “best of every world”.

A lot of people have found that Shareaza does really well in the download area too, but once again that isn’t the result of any unfair play. It doesn’t hammer hosts or use any unethical tricks. Unlike many other clients which have had to tack new features onto existing code, Shareaza’s download core was designed from scratch to support optimized fragment acquisition and efficient scheduling. From what I’ve seen, it has the most sophisticated mechanism out there. (and for good reason – I use a 28.8k modem, the faster the better!)

Anyway, thanks again for the support and many suggestions we’ve received. The current Shareaza release is 1.0.2.2, however in the next day or two we should see a new major release which is very, very cool. I’m pretty sure Shareaza already sports more features than any competing product, but there’ll be absolutely no doubt about that soon. Everything happens faster, you get more control, and yeah.. its good.