From now on whenever my hand is NOT raised it means I'm confused.

Actually this thread isn't confusing me, but I've been reading other posts in other threads where people are complaining about freeloaders and stuff, which is cool with me because freeloading seems rude, but I'm confused about a few things.

People seem to talk about IPs a lot and how they would like to come up with ways to ban certain IPs from downloading from them because of the freeloading issue. Also I've read people gripe about how a certain IP/person is only giving them 1KB/s.

My questions are:

1. What if someone is very generous IN GENERAL and has uploaded a zillion files over the months, but in the past few days has been having trouble and really wants to download a certain file, so he or she temporarily turns off uploading just to make it easier to get that one file? Can experienced but pi**ed off users note that IP address and add it to the sh** list somehow?

2. Usually when I go watch TV (when I'm all done downloading) I turn uploading on 100% if it's not already and come back during commercials to monitor things. Sometimes I see a whole lot of uploads that got cancelled, and sometimes (even with upload bandwidth at 100% and only a couple upload slots so that these couple slots should each be getting lots of bandwidth) each slot is uploading at like 1 or 2 KB/s. My questions is, after reading all the anger in some of these threads, are there people getting mad at me because they think I'm doing things I'm really not? How much can people really tell about me? I think in my case (and in the case of many others), the big picture about me and my habits, the big profile, would be great, but sometimes when for whatever reasons things just aren't working right, are people thinking I'm being stingy when I'm really not? I mean these peoples' posts I've read griping about someone giving them only 1KB/s, how do they know the people are stingy and not just having problems?

3. I'm going to ask this question under firewalls (and also try to read more about it) but I figured I'd ask it here anyway because it's related to me feeling leery about being involved with file sharing at this early stage when I don't know too much. I read someone gripe about firewalls, but how does someone even know a person is using a firewall and not just having problems?

TTYL :o)