The idea is indeed apealing ... although it would take some tweaking to make it work. Take, for instance, me, who has a little over 10 gigs consisting of roughly 2000 files shared. My GQ under your system would probably give me a fairly low score, because I have a cable modem with upstream speed capped at 128 kbps. Because of this limitation, I limit file uploads to 3 users at a time, one file per user. This way, people get reasonably decent speeds.

I consider myself a good user ... I often remove the bandwidth limiter, especially if I'm asleep or away from the computer. And I leave my servent running as much as possible. My upload ques are always filled, and I get lots of hits on my material. I also connect to betwen 7-10 hosts (more if I'm away from the computer), increasing the conectivity of the network. Still, because I upload a lot slower than I download, your system would probably end up penalizing me.

Secondly, this might discourage sharing of rarer, but cooler, files because people want to keep their upload stats inflated.

Third, this doesn't really get around your objection re: bogus files, since people could inflate their stats by encouraging uploads of crap, particularly as a newbie before they've accumulated lots of files.

Fourth, you're talking about a drastic change in the protocol in order to allow the GQ stat to be reported along with the rest of the information returned in searches, etc.

On the other hand, a similar quotent based on the total size of files shared would be easier to impliment, and fairer to me (remember, in this community, it's always about me .

Simpler because the total number of files shared and total size could be calculated based on the listing of users' directories. This information is already available for many servents via the web interface, and it would be relatively straight forward to enhance this so it worked more efficiently, without requiring servents to respond to searches differently.

Fairer because those who are sharing as much as possible, but limited by their isp in their upload speed wouldn't be hurt.

Still doesn't address to issue of bogus files, but there's no real way to address that issue effectively. I'll simply restate that your option doesn't effectively deal with the issue either.

Your idea has the benefit of being totally automated, though, whereas mine would require some human intervention. Although, i guess it's possible to have some sort of criteria in the upload window "[]Only allow uploads to servents with _______ MB shared"

Either way, we're talking about adding a new dimmension to the network, which is in effect finding ways to enforce the golden rule.

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-Lurker