I don't know if this thread belongs here or not, and if it doesn't, I apologize. I just need to know how/if I can contact a particular host or send them a message. I've been looking for a really rare file for a while now and I've finally found someone who has it. I've tried to download it a number of times, but I'm never able to - it just says "looking for file" and then "stalled". It's probably because no one else has this file. Is there any way I can send this host a message requesting that they send me the file? BTW I'm using Limewire ver. 5.3.6 Pro.

Greetings lindsayp and welcome to the Gnutella forums.

I don't know of any way to contact a host.

I had an experience very similar to yours. After waiting weeks to connect to the host, I looked for the file on torrent sites and was able to download it within a few hours (it was a movie from '68).

While LW is not a very good torrent client, it can download them. You can do a Google search for your file on torrent sites. When you find the file, you should see a "download this torrent" button somewhere on the page; click it. A download window should open; click on "open" (Not "save") and you should then see the file appear in your LW downloading window.

Thanks for the reply! I found a torrent once that contained the file I was looking for, and I opened it with Limewire and selected that file and a few others to download, but it would never progress. I eventually just gave up. Love your avatar, by the way!

LW does not comform to all of the protocols required of many torrent sites, so that may have been the problem. You could try other torrent sites to find the file. You can also try a 'true' torrent client, such as Vuze or uTorrent (both are free).

Of course, none of that will make a difference if the file is simply unpopular. Still, searching for torrents does not limit you to the Gnutella network (as does LW).

There are public torrents that lose seeders. Too many hit & runs; people download but don't share back. I've had two torrents sitting at 30 & 60% downloaded since earlier in year but no progress in months. (I'm not the only person waiting, lots of others.)

Thanks for the tips. I remember downloading one of those other programs to try to open the torrent and it still didn't work, so I guess it is an unpopular file. Another problem is that I don't understand a lot of the p2p terminology. It seems like you have to have a degree to understand it all...

Some help here: Beginners Guide to torrents.

And much more can be found in the threads in this forum (use the Forum Jump on bottom right of this page).

Thank you for your help. I checked the link you gave to the guide, and even some of the stuff there seems complicated. I think unless I have a tech guy actually do all this stuff for me, I'll probably never get that flippin' file. Ugh, and I actually thought I was somewhat computer-savvy. What's more annoying is no one else has this file available for purchase, so this was like my last hope. Oh well. I'll keep trying to download it on LW, and I might take a crack at the whole torrent thing sometime. Again, thanks for all your help!