You make an excellent point, Trap_Jaw4, and I must certainly acquiesce to your superior technical knowledge of the LimeWire product.

I would expect that, with the ultimate objective of customer satisfaction in mind --and why else would any company expend time and capital resources to develop any product but to fulfill customers' needs in any given market-- the combined expertise of the technical and marketing people who oversee LimeWire's development will have considered the pros and cons of integrating features that would enhance LimeWire's technical capabilities vis-a-vis the impact such features might have on bandwidth constraints and traffic monitoring.

You maintain that adding (back into the product?) a feature that would allow LimeWire to automatically (i.e, without human intervention or supervision) periodically search for sources that were not found upon the application's launch, would increase the traffic flow, with the implication that this would be a bad thing for the Gnutella network, and, therefore, for its customers. Again, if LimeWire's technical experience in this area causes it to make a reasonable conclusion that implementing such a feature would truly result in a net loss of customer satisfaction, then, of course, it would be wise not to implement such a feature.

However, your argument also implies that it would be a bad thing for customers who are constantly attentive to their LimeWire application and all its pending searches to hit the Resume button in regards to incomplete downloads, or to click on the Find Sources button when a file's status falls into the never-never land of "Awaiting Sources" or "Need More Sources." Do you really expect customers not to ask LimeWire to resume going out on the Internet to find the files they want to download, even if doing so every few minutes would increase the traffic exponentially more than if an unattended LimeWire did so automatically on their behalf at greater intervals?

What is the overall goal here? Is it to minimize traffic, or is it to maximize customer satisfaction by encouraging as many people to be sharing files on the network as possible?

If you consider that customer satisfaction is the only real criterion for implementing enhanced features in a product, would it not be more satisfying to your customer base overall if we were given an incentive for leaving our computers on when we were away from it for extended periods of time, so that others could have more files available for them to upload, and so that those of us who are sharing would have the satisfaction of knowing that the product was working on our behalf even though we were not baby sitting it constantly?

LimeWire developers have the last technical word obviously, but I think the developers ought to blend in marketing considerations as well when they decide what features to integrate and what features are better left on the cutting room floor.

Thanks for the dialogue.